Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) is a public University with 5200 students and 1700 employees. The number of international students is about 600. NMBU consists of seven faculties: Faculty of Biosciences, Faculty of Chemistry, Biotechnology and Food Science, Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Faculty of Landscape and Society, School of Economics and Business, Faculty of Science and Technology and Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.

NMBU’s special mission 

The world is facing major, complex challenges in fields such as climate change, environmental pollution, population growth, migration, poverty, public and animal health, food and water supply, energy, use and protection of natural resources and areas.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals were adopted in 2015 as a starting point for concerted efforts to safeguard the future of our planet. NMBU represents a unique academic synthesis of environmental and life sciences, bio-production, veterinary medicine, technology, land use planning and economics providing us with the perfect position to help solve these challenges and enable a sustainable future in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. 

AGROVOC at NMBU University Library

The work with AGROVOC is organized under the University Library. The team working with AGROVOC consists of a Senior Librarian and a Special Librarian with many years of competence in AGROVOC. The team holds experience in indexing in AGRIS since 1986 and has giving courses in Information Literacy for students and researchers for many years back. The team has long time experience in use of AGROVOC for indexing in Alma/ORIA (ExLibris) common database of the University Libraries for Norwegian Research and Higher Education. The team also holds expertise in Open Access, metadata, research documentation, institutional repositories and cataloguing. 

In May this year a request was sent to add AGROVOC as authority files in Alma. This is still under consideration by the ExLibris group.

We are planning further co-operation with The Arctic University of Norway and the AGROVOC team at FAO to include Sami language in AGROVOC. 

AGROVOC is a controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It is widely used in specialized libraries as well as digital libraries and repositories to index content and for the purpose of text mining. It is also used as a specialized tagging resource for content organization by FAO and third-party stakeholders. AGROVOC is published monthly with the aim to improve the quality of the services for the agricultural community, AGROVOC is now engaging with expert communities that are contributing and benefiting of the AGROVOC services.