The role of AGROVOC in the discovery of agricultural information and data in the Republic of Moldova

On 8 June 2021 the second edition of the online Round Table was organized by the Republican Scientific Agricultural Library of the State Agrarian University of Moldova in collaboration with FAO.

The round table was dedicated to discussions on facilitating access and increasing the visibility of the Moldovan agricultural scientific results in the context of AGRIS and AGROVOC. During the meeting, trends and evolutions related to the management and dissemination of information and research data in the field of agriculture and food industry were analyzed. Several researchers, PhD students, teachers, journal publishers and librarians participated in the event. 

The Round Table was divided into two parts, one about the role of AGRIS and one about the role of AGROVOC in the agricultural information system.  The second part of the Round Table dedicated to AGROVOC covered the following topics: components, structure and languages and areas covered by the thesaurus; AGROVOC alignments with other controlled thesaurus and vocabularies; the role of the AGROVOC thesaurus in research, education and in accessing agricultural information and data; and integration of agricultural Romanian terminology in AGROVOC.

The main objective of the discussions was dedicated to building a better understanding of the role of AGROVOC in research, education and in discovery of agricultural information and data. 

In the opening session, Imma Subirats, FAO information management officer responsible for coordinating the AGRIS, AGROVOC and AGORA programs, emphasized the role of AGRIS and AGROVOC in the global information space and their importance for the agricultural community in the Republic of Moldova. She referred to the awareness-raising and training activities organized by the library in collaboration with FAO, and also to the AGRIS and AGROVOC user guides translated into Romanian. 

The second introductory speaker of the session, Liudmila Costin, Director of the Republican Scientific Agricultural Library, pointed out the need to extend the collaboration between libraries and scientific institutions and researchers at the national level to better consolidate efforts to integrate agricultural information and data from the Republic of Moldova in the global informational environment.

The meeting highlighted the need for:

• Creating collaborative and interactive experiences with the agricultural community in the Republic of Moldova in order to increase the relevance of the use and development of the agricultural thesaurus in Romanian;
• Increasing the number of concepts and terms in Romanian in order to reduce the numerical gap in relation to the number of concepts in English;
• Increasing awareness of the AGROVOC opportunities and challenges;
• Adding new definitions and scope notes in Romanian in order to facilitate the understanding of the meaning and application of terms;
• Applying Linked Open Data principles by adding alignments to AGROVOC;
• Promoting newly translated terms among Moldovan academic communities through different ways (AGROVOC Month Concept in Romanian – idea taken from AGROVOC FAO Team, AGROVOC Event Concept – concepts dedicated to some international days, such as World Egg Day, World Water Day etc.); 
• Organizing a training to develop users’ skills in searching information in AGROVOC thesaurus; and
• Disseminating information about AGROVOC through the AGROVOC directory, placed on the library's website, social networks and e-mail.

The AGRIS and AGROVOC directories were launched on the library website during the Round Table with the aim to promote the library's activities within the AGRIS system and the AGROVOC editorial community. The categories of information presented by both directories include news, general information on AGRIS and AGROVOC, access methods, organized activities (round tables, campaigns, trainings, webinars etc.), publications on AGRIS and AGROVOC in Romanian etc.