Central Scientific Agricultural Library (CSAL)

The Federal State Budgetary Scientific Institution "Central Scientific Agricultural Library" (CSAL) is the oldest Bibliographic Center for Agricultural Science and Food Industry in the Russian Federation. The library was founded in 1930. More than 3 million items are stored in the library collection. Since 1992, CSAL has been managing AGROS, the largest agricultural database in Russian in the world. This database contains information about books and articles published both in Russian and foreign periodicals or serial editions (the annual increment is about 40,000 records). The specialists of CSAL are engaged in developing sectoral linguistic tools: the national information retrieval thesaurus on agriculture and food; the sectoral classification index (rubricator) for agriculture and food; and the special UDC tables for the agroindustrial sector.

CSAL first contributed to AGRIS in 1988. In the period 1988-1996, about 5,500 records were prepared in cooperation with another information center and then published. Since 2007, CSAL has been operating as a National AGRIS center in the Russian Federation. The main task of the center is to promote Russian research and knowledge in the global information space. CSAL also works to improve the quality of scientific publications in Russian agrarian journals, with more than 12,000 publications of high quality prepared since 2007. Processing about 100 records a month over the years, CSAL has developed quality assessment criteria for articles and journals, as well as recommendations on how to prepare information, especially abstracts, in the best way. CSAL is open to providing guidance to those interested in contributing to AGRIS.