Analysis of thematic queries from remote users of the Belarusian Agricultural Library (using AGROVOC thesaurus descriptors)

The search for up-to-date information in national, foreign and international information systems is the most important part of the library-information and reference -bibliographic service of scientists and specialists of the Belarusian Agricultural Library. To carry out a high-quality search on a certain topic, the content of the request is formulated by means of an information retrieval language, i.e. a search profile is created. One of the linguistic tools used for indexing and searching scientific information in international information retrieval systems and covering a wide range of agricultural, food industry and related issues is AGROVOC, the multilingual thesaurus the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The Belarusian Agricultural Library started developing its Belarusian version in 2022. At the initial stage the tasks for determining the priority subject categories (areas) of the subsequent terminological research were performed. In this regard, the staff of the Scientific and Bibliographic Department of Remote User Service processed requests from remote users of the Belarusian Agricultural Library for 2021 based on the creation of search profiles of thematic queries using the descriptors of the AGROVOC thesaurus. In total, 1,920 requests for 2021 from 626 users from 32 organizations were processed. It is noted that as a linguistic toolkit the AGROVOC thesaurus has a sufficient set of descriptors to cover various aspects of agrarian science, fishery, forestry, food and other related areas, while at the same time there is potential for its content addition and extension. The results of the content analysis of thematic queries indicate that scientific research and development of Belarusian specialists today are aimed at raising the agro-industrial complex of the country and obtaining competitive agricultural products.

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