Central Scientific Agricultural Library (CSAL) is the leading information center in the field of agriculture in the Russian Federation. CSAL has created a thesaurus on agriculture and food in Russian and maintains the Russian version of AGROVOC.

The team working on AGROVOC is comprised of five people – one coordinator plus several experts in specific fields of agriculture who use special terminology both in English and in Russian on a daily basis, drawing on other experts as needed.

The library uses AGROVOC for indexing AGRIS records and promotes its use as a tool for translators of agricultural literature. Over the past year, the team has added about 650 new concepts to AGROVOC from existing Russian thesauri, translated 250 labels, including Latin scientific names and Russian common names, and added more than 600 terms in both English and Russian in the area of agroengineering – an area they plan to further develop in the coming year.

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.