Upgrading my work laptop to Windows 10...

...while actually working on deliverables and other stuff. How smart is that? :-P

I tried to postpone it but I get this weird urge whenever an update is available - no matter what so I decided to move on at this very moment! For the time being I am working and upgrading at the same time... fingers crossed!

Our paper for the EDEN Open Classroom 2015 got accepted :-)

Some weeks ago, we prepared and submitted a paper titled "Environmental Education Through Enquiry and Technology: The Case of the GreeNET Poject" for the EDEN Open Classroom 2015 Conference, that will take place in Athens, Greece between 18-21/9/2015. According to the organizers, "the Conference incorporates the final event of the Digiskills project, a European project demonstrating ways to involve school communities in innovative teaching and learning practices, and empower teachers and trainers to use, share and exploit unique resource, as well as the GreeNET project that aims to address the increasing necessity to develop an integrative approach in environmental education. The timing will also make several of the conference activities the first steps in the sustainability of the Open Discovery Space project, one of the ever-largest EU co-funded educational networking initiative."

On Friday we received a notification from the Program Committee that our paper has been accepted for presentation at the conference and inclusion in the ISBN-identified Conference Proceedings (to be published in both printed and electronic versions). :-)

The paper describes the tools developed and used by the GreeNET project, namely the GreeNET Inventory, the GreeNET Best Practice Authoring Tool and the GreeNET Moodle. I wish I could share some more details on these, but I will have to go prepare my slides for the presentation now; the presentation will take place on Sunday, September 20th Saturday, September 19th 2015 and you are invited to attend :-)

Change of role - change of signature

I took some time today to revise my email signature, in order for it to reflect my new role in the team - Senior Project Manager! It feels strange to see this revision in the signature, even though I adapted in my new role pretty quickly; after all, I am no stranger to project management! I spent several years in the past supporting the management (and mostly the implementation) of several of our projects and have flown thousands of miles traveling all over Europe in order to represent Agro-Know (and not only) in project meetings, Conferences and Workshops

I also did the corresponding revisions in my Agro-Know wiki profile; I still have to revise the text on the corresponding website Team page. Small but still significant revisions.

PubAg: Providing Open Access to agricultural research

PubAg is the National Agricultural Library's (NAL) search system for agricultural information. It provides access to quality agricultural research publications both from USDA-affiliated researchers as well as from external ones. authored and other highly relevant agricultural research. When it was launched, it started with a number of 40,000 full-text journal articles provided by USDA staff  and including about 450,000 citations to both internal and external publications. The aim of the National Agricultural Library is the enrichment of the available content on a monthly basis, by adding about 20,000 citations each month.

PubAg provides access to full-text articles relevant to the agricultural sciences, along with citations to peer-reviewed journal articles. Each resource is described with metadata, including

• Title
• Abstract
• NAL terms: They are clickable, so by clicking one of them, you get a list of results tagged with the specific term.
• Names of Authors: They are clickable, so by clicking one of them, you get a list of results from the specific author.
• Citation
• Link to the publisher's record (through DOI): The link can be used to access the metadata record of the publisher and hopefully the full-text article, if it is openly shared (i.e. it is not available behind a paywall).

In addition, each metadata record can be exported as CSV or printed; in the latter case, the user receives a printer-friendly version of the metadata record.

A metadata record in PubAg

On the other hand, when a user want to perform a query with specific terms, he can use a free-text search box. Words entered into the search box are automatically translated into subject terms from the NAL Thesaurus (NALT) and the corresponding documents tagged with these NALT terms are retrieved and presented to the user.

List of results after a query

As of today, PubAg provides access to about 972,000 metadata records and 42,000 full-text articles. 200,000 records reflect on research published after 2012, which makes the content really up to date.

 I was also surprised to find a few of my publications on the PubAg portal!

Who would have thought...(some of) my publications available through PubAg!

Thanks to the ongoing work related to GACS (Global Agricultural Concept Scheme), this large database of quality agricultural research outcomes will be easily interconnected with others, such as the FAO AGRIS (that Agro-Know is maintaining and expanding, boasting almost 8M records) and the CAB Abstracts (about 2M records). This is expected to greatly facilitate the work of agrifood researchers, information and knowledge managers, among others.

Turning three thesauri into a Global Agricultural Concept Scheme from CIARD Movement