The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is set to host a webinar intended to highlight FAO’s valuable multilingual controlled vocabulary, AGROVOC, and how it can impact multilingual research through AGORA. The webinar titled  “AGROVOC: making research more visible across languages” will be held on 5 December at 14:00 CET.

Research4Life recently integrated AGROVOC as a “reference source” in the AGORA collection. Therefore, this webinar will provide in-depth information about how to access and use AGROVOC through the AGORA collection and the impact it can make on multilingual research for students, researchers, or professionals looking to take advantage of AGORA's extensive resources.

Participants of this webinar will learn in-depth strategies for optimizing the value of AGROVOC through the AGORA collection, including:

• Introducing AGROVOC, the multilingual thesaurus;
• Demonstrating the importance of utilizing keywords in research;
• Indicating how to access and utilize AGROVOC;
• Explaining the value of multilingual vocabularies in research;
• And revealing how AGROVOC is useful for Research4Life and AGORA users

The webinar is intended for both prospective and present users of the Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) platform.

Interested participants can register for the webinar here: https://fao.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvd--hrTwpGNU-q1CfY5YURFoujUvDXQBM

More about AGROVOC

AGROVOC is a multilingual and controlled vocabulary that covers concepts and terminology under FAO's areas of interest. It is a structured collection of concepts, terms, definitions and relationships. These concepts can represent anything related to food and agriculture, spanning from specific terms like "maize" to broader concepts like "hunger," "aquaculture," "value chains," or "forestry."  AGROVOC plays a crucial role in providing unambiguous identification of resources, standardising indexing processes, and enhancing the efficiency of search functions. Additionally, each concept in AGROVOC is associated with terms used to express it in multiple languages, known as lexicalisations. Currently, AGROVOC  has over 41 000 concepts and  994 000 terms available in up to 42 languages.

More about AGORA

Since 2003, FAO has led the AGORA collection, which provides access to thousands of journals, e-books, and other information resources covering agriculture, fisheries, food, nutrition, veterinary science and related biological, environmental and social sciences in public institutions across the world.  The aim of the programme is to improve the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research, education and training in low-income countries.

Subscription-based journals and major scientific books remain important sources of high-quality scientific information that are crucial in advancing higher education, improving the ability to share findings, and informing about public policy decisions. AGORA is one of the five programmes that make up Research4Life.