On August 25^th, a new release of the AGRIS Web portal (http://agris.fao.org) was launched. It contains many new features and some optimizations of functionalities that were already available. In particular, the main new features refer to:

• New homepage: now the homepage contains directly the preview of three random records recently added to the AGRIS collection
• In the homepage preview and in the mashup page there is the new block “other information” : it contains all bibliographic metadata of a record
• A link to the classical search is now available directly in the homepage
• Help button in the toolbar (right side)
• All buttons have now tips when you point the mouse on top of them
• Some important security features were added and libraries were updated
• Chinese interface: all labels have been translated

In addition to that, two new datasets have been interlinked to the AGRIS database, thanks to the cooperation with the Agricultural Information Institute of CAAS: the Chinese Agricultural Sci-tech Documents Database (CASDD) and the CGRIS germplasm database. Currently, the access to those datasets can be slow, since they are available as Web services hosted in China, and the connection between Europe and China is sometimes slow. In the next months, we will improve the services, making access to them faster.