In the regular let's-take-a-look-elsewhere section, we have a brief look at two gateways in the area of agriculture. With the development of NOVAGate (due to be released on 5th May), and other news on the gateway grapevine of agriculture resource discovery activities elsewhere, it would seem that this particular subject area is becoming particulary blessed with resource discovery tools.
As with all gateways, the best way to get a feel for them is to explore, search and browse.
First, we have the very well-known Agview. This uses the classic search-and-browse approach to resource discovery, but takes the slightly unusual approach of cramming all of the top-level browsable section titles, as well as the search box, onto the home page. The seperate search page does not offer any extra searching facilities.
Resource descriptions are a mixture of those written by the gateway cataloguing team, and those submitted by members of the public. Unfortunately, entries from the latter are not edited, so some of the entries are of decidedly commercial interest/of variable quality - there are also a few entries in different languages. For these reasons alone, high-quality gateways should be cautious about cross-searching such a gateway as Agview (unless the resources catalogued in Agview were clearly tagged as such).
The amount of content in the gateway is slightly confusing, as, for example, it is unclear what is really meant by "total sites" and "total indexed". I suspect that the browsable categories contain the lower indexed figure, while the search facility allows you to search across the larger "total sites" catalogue. The "What's new" facility (always a good feature of gateways; as well as showing what new resources have been added, it also shows how active the ongoing development of the gateway catalogue is) shows that an average of two resources a day are being added - though of late, these seem to be mostly unchecked commercial material (and not always related to agriculture). Checking a random sample of 20 resources found that 17 worked i.e. connected to their host site, with 3 dead links, which puts a question mark on the criteria of link checking.
Overall, the interface is very easy to use, so top marks for that. Access time from the UK, as well as search time, is reasonable. However, the gateway falls down on the quality front, through allowing people to submit resources unchecked - if incoming submissions were filtered, and non-relevant/low-quality material removed from the catalogue, this could be a very high quality site.
Now take a look at AgDB. This is a gateway maintained by the agriculture network information centre. The resource catalogue contains somewhere in the region of 800 quality agriculture-related databases, datasets, and information systems. Of interest to many people is how metadata is used by AgDB - which uses Swish-E technology, as touched on in the previous issue of the ROADS newsletter. Take a look at the resource catalogue entry below:
Here, we see that there is a substantial amount of information returned about this particular resource. The amount returned varies between different resources - we found one with just five fields of filled-in information. However, on average there is a relatively considerable amount of information captured about each resource.
Within AgDB, resources can also be located via either browsing a flat alphabetical listing, or a hierarchy of resources arranged by subject area. In addition, the system allows people to search on a subject code. These codes are a superset of the "AGRIS Subject Category Code system", which allow "National Agricultural Library indexers and catalogers to categorize bibliographic records".
Access time and search time are quite good. Checking a random sample of 20 resources resulted in all 20 having working links. so they probably have some kind of link checking in operation.
Overall, this gateway gets the thumbs up in terms of catalogue integrity. The way in which information about resources is collected and stored will be of interest to metadata/subject gateway developers elsewhere. From the end-user point of view, the gateway is fairly easy to use if you are heavily into agriculture, and are especially familiar with the subject codes used.
