Besides providing selected key documents, this information portal is designed to serve as a gateway to find the most up-to-date and relevant information sources/ gateways concerning specific thematic fields of drylands properties and management. Given the comprehensiveness of this information tool users are often directed to other information portals (see the green-coloured hyperlinks) from where they will be able to retrieve more in-depth information.
It should be noted that the green-coloured entries (hyperlinks) in the lists of selected key information sources only function when the computer is connected to the internet; and also that the order of entries in the lists of key documents is not necessarily reflecting an order of relevancy.
Furthermore, the information presented is selected according to the following criteria:
availability in digital format
up-to-dateness
high relevancy regarding the specific section headline (key documents)
selection of a limited number of information sources per section (to avoid an overflow of information)
in the case of hyperlinks to other websites, preference is often given to URLs that represent general sections in the structure of other websites rather than very specific locations.
How to find the information you are looking for?
There are several ways of finding the drylands related information you are looking for:
1) You can make use of the pre-selection of information and its assignment to certain headlines by
navigating through the menu bar of the information base or
searching a specific subsection in the site map.
Please note that you may find the same document in several subsections.
2) You can search the FAO drylands database which encompasses all records in this information base by the search functions of the
LADA Virtual Centre (internet access required) either
as a free text search or
according to keywords.
3) You can search through the titles and the meta data (see 'details' pages) of all documents included in this information base using a search engine integrated in this website/DVD (no internet access required).
Have you encountered any broken links?
If so, use the 'Search in Google' function, which you will find in each of the 'details' pages related to each of the documents. By clicking it, the title will automatically be entered into the Google Search so that you may be able to find the information this way (internet access required).
