Meet the AGROVOC editorial community

Marina Đačić, information librarian at the Matica Srpska Library (MSL), is the AGRIS focal point in her organization. She is actively engaged in the AGROVOC editorial community as editor for Serbian since 2019.

How did you start your experience in AGROVOC and how are you engaging with it?

In June 2019, I attended a regional workshop on “Strengthening the Accessibility and Visibility of Agricultural and Land Data through the Use of Semantics - AGRIS in Europe and Central Asia” held by FAO and hosted by the Central Scientific Agricultural Library (CSAL) in Moscow (Russian Federation). This event gave me the opportunity to meet colleagues from AGRIS national centers  who were also part of the AGROVOC editorial community. This prompted me to take the initiative and get involved in the AGROVOC community as an editor for Serbian. Thanks to FAO, I started to practice in 2019 and since January 2020, I have been working as an active editor.

What has been the most important achievement being part of the editorial community?

Currently, in AGROVOC there are 1,580 preferred terms and 73 alternate terms in Serbian.  The opportunity to add Serbian terms in Cyrillic  ​​in a multilingual, specialized, agricultural thesaurus is a great achievement. Being part of the AGROVOC editorial community and participating in its community meetings always enriches me thanks to the exchange of information and cooperation with colleagues from all over the world.  

How does your work in AGROVOC benefit your organization?

From the very beginning, MSL has worked to protect the Serbian cultural and scientific heritage, as well as the Serbian language. Participation in the AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus helps us achieve these goals. The translation of AGROVOC terms also helps the diffusion of scientific publications in Serbian making them visible, searchable and accessible to the international scientific community.

AGROVOC is updated by our editors and our team on a daily basis. What was your last contribution to AGROVOC as editor?

The last term I translated in Serbian was ˝sludge = муљ˝. It will be published in the next AGROVOC monthly release in June. In the process of translating terms into Serbian, I consult numerous dictionaries and lexicons on agriculture, forestry, veterinary medicine, and even chemistry, physics, technical sciences and others. Sometimes it is very easy to find the right word and the translation goes fast. However, sometimes a few days may pass searching for concepts and the right word or sentence that would most accurately define a specific concept.

Do you have a favorite term in AGROVOC?

One of my favorite AGROVOC terms is ˝chocolate = чоколада˝, which sounds similarly in many languages​. I believe it puts a smile on everyone's face. 

About Matica Srpska Library (MSL)

Matica Srpska Library (MSL) is the oldest Serbian library of national importance and the first public and scientific library of the Serbs. It was founded in Pest (Hungary) in 1826 together with the Matica Srpska Literary Society. In 1864, it moved to Novi Sad. Today, the MSL has a rich collection of old and rare books, which has been carefully developed from the very beginning. The library collections have regularly been enlarged and hold over four million publications in 132 languages.