The USDA’s National Agricultural Library (NAL), a national library of the United States, is home to the world’s largest collection of materials and information related to agriculture, agricultural science, and related disciplines. Located in Beltsville, Maryland, the Library serves scientists and researchers by assisting with database searches, literature reviews, and requests for hard-to-find documents and records. NAL’s Information Systems Division (ISD) develops and maintains applications that enable public access to the Library’s digital resources.
Since 2016, DSFederal has supported large-scale O&M and development efforts for NAL, including Drupal web development and search improvement powered by Blacklight and Solr. We are pleased to add a new task order to our growing NAL portfolio, supporting the AGRICOLA database. AGRICOLA (AGRICultural OnLine Access) is an online public-access database containing publications and resources encompassing all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines.
AGRICOLA comprises two subsets of records; one that includes journal article citations; and a second that contains over 5 million bibliographic records from around the world, including some that are centuries old.
With a team of software developers working working under Agile methodology, DSFederal will create, develop, integrate, and automate DPD procedures and workflows to ensure the integrity of content in the NAL Unified Repositories (UR) and the Voyager Integrated Library System (ILS).
This effort will involve use of scientific library-related technologies such as MARC data, Fedora Commons, Search platforms, Apache Solr and RDF/SPARQL graph databases; as well as scripting languages such as XML/XSLT, JavaScript, Perl, and Python. DSFederal CEO Sophia Parker writes: "We are so pleased to continue our long support of the National Agricultural Library, and honored to contribute to its efforts to advance research in the agricultural sciences We are also delighted to continue expanding our expertise in advanced database and software technologies." The AGRICOLA task order will begin in December 2018, and will continue through December 2019.