Summary on the training course on Electronic Production of Agricultural Documents and Bibliographic Database Management in Beijing

A 7-day training course,  sponsored by the FAO Waicent (http://www.fao.org/waicent) and organized by the Literature and Information Centre of CAAS, was held in  Beijing in October, 2003. People attending the training inlcuded about 30 information workers from more than 20 provincial academies of agricultural sciences and several agricultural universities. All the training courses were given by Waicent officials and staffs in English. Prof. He, in Literature and Information Centre of CAAS, acted as the interpreter.

After the training, every trainee was required to write an evaluation on this training course in English. Several representatives were selected to talk about what they have gained from the training and what needs to be furtherly improved.

The following is my commentary on this training.

_____________________________

I can summarize this training course with three‘G’s: Good teaching contents, Good teachers, Good results.

1. About the teaching contents: The internet has brought about information revolution. It’s more convenient and quicker for people to get information. They don’t need to look up one book or one article through shelves to shelves of the holdings. They just need input several keywords, the title of one article or the book name, the names of the authors or other information related to the book or the article, then they can immediately get the desired information only if the information can be available and accessible on the internet. So the important problem is how to let the information available and accessible. This training course has given presentation on many basic concepts related to web and database, online library, electronic publishing, such as the metadata, DTD, AGMES, HTML, XML, and on how to create XML or HTML files, and how to create Word Processing template, how to create a webpage using XML or HTML, how to conduct data exchange among different languages, how to retrieve information via internet or from the (FAO) Agris database and other online databases, and how to log in web agris and download information.

2. About the teachers and the teaching methods: All the teachers are so excellent. Although English is not their native language, they all can speak perfect English. They are expert at computer knowledge and operational skills, so they can solve any problems immediately during the class. And they have good teaching experience. They organize their materials very well and present them in well-designed slides with words and pictures, graphics, which greatly facilitate us to understand the contents. Johannes, Anne and Stefano are so patient and kind with us. We are very happy to be in the class and learn so much useful knowledge from them.

3. About the study results: Under the interesting topic “Electronic production of agricultural documents and bibliographic database management”, and under the teachers’ good presentation and guide, we have learned much. Through this training, I have learned how to retrieve information more effectively and efficiently, how to login the (FAO) database and retrieve information or provide data for the Web agris, how to create webpages with HTML. We have also learnt the work flow of the electronic publishing; the data (words, graphics, tables) processing, scanning, the transformation between different document types.

★I also have some suggestions

1. Make the FAO Agris with richer information and try to provide as possible more abstracts for the readers;

2. Enlarge the subject thesaurus to facilitate the information indexing;

3. Organize more such kinds of training and have more information exchange among agricultural information service workers in the future.

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