The library “Theodosis Christou” of the Agricultural Research Institute (ARI) is a public library established in 1962.  The library visitors’ can use it to study and take advantage of its services: to search and find printed and digital material - books, journals, magazines - all related with agricultural information from Cyprus and worldwide.

Specifically, it contains books, scientific journals, dissertations, magazines, and databases in contractually and electronic form.  These specialized materials are arranged in a specified order according to a library classification system (Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system version 22) – a general knowledge organization tool.

The researchers of the Institute have free access to all the information sources, of the library, through a closed locally electronic system and can borrow books or journals. Also, the library of the Institute collaborates with others Cypriot institutions’ libraries to exchanged materials, such as journal articles.

The ARI library is member to the ProQuest platform. ProQuest delivers article and content updates to enhance services to their users by integrating the latest articles in a particular field into the corresponding e-resources page on our library website.

The library is the partner to AGRIS. In particular, it is the AGRIS National Centre for Cyprus to contribute to AGRIS.  It is using WebAGRIS 2.0, a complete, multilingual Web-based system for distributed data input, processing and dissemination (through the Internet or on CD-Rom), of agricultural bibliographic information. The ARI WebAGRIS website allows for search and browse of bibliographic data and documents that are available in electronic format.

Finally, the library participates in the VOA3R-project: Virtual Open Access Agriculture and Aquaculture Repository: Sharing Scientific and Scholarly Research related to Agriculture, Food and Environment. VOA3R is a social platform for researchers in agriculture & aquaculture integrating open access institutional research repositories and using the AGROVOC thesaurus combined with terminologies specific to research methods. The ARI library contribution to VOA3R will be more than 300 open and free access publications, dating back in 1965 and onwards.

For more information about the Agricultural Research Institute, its library and other related information about Cyprus’s agriculture you can visit our websites (in Greek and  English), read our blog, and follow us on Twitter at ARI_RD.