Caring for the Forest: Research in a Changing World can be undertaken only under improved conditions of information technology transfer and knowledge exchange. During the past 7 years various technological, economic & conceptual developments have lead to the expansion of forestry information services in India. The TREECD database, a specialist CD-ROM product, is being used to keep the forestry professionals in touch with world's forestry research. On a single disc TREECD provides over 350,000 abstracts for over fifty years period in a convenient easily searchable form. This is the most comprehensive forestry information source containing all the bibliographic citations & abstracts published in Forestry Abstracts, Forest Product Abstracts and Agroforestry Abstracts from their respective beginnings in 1939,1978 & 1988 to-date. The only limitation of CD-ROM technology is that it cannot keep the scientists up-to-date in information search since they may miss some latest information published during the last 612 months. It has been overcome by subscribing Current Contents with Abstracts (CCAB) on Diskette: Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences, which is the most powerful journal awareness database service from Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Philadelphia, USA. This enables the scientists to search and browse the latest bibliographical data covering a variety of disciplines including Forestry every week. All the libraries in the country today are in financial crisis. The viable alternatives in financial constraints were explored and information sources such as TREECD and CCAB on diskette were put to maximum use. Consequently Document Delivery Service was given priority and the resources are being shared with other libraries. Further various conceptual developments if pursued to fruition in the second half of 1990's will improve the efficiency of retrieval of forestry information. An ambitious overall goal in the second half of 1990's envisages a nationally disseminated CD-based forestry informati
on database.
Keywords: forestry information services; information technology transfer; knowledge exchange.
Correspondence: M.S. Pathania, Dr. Y.S.Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Library, Solan (HP)-173 230, India
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