TEEAL: The Essential Electronic Agricultural LibraryGetting the Lit- erature of Agriculture to the Developing Countries

What Is TEEAL? In one sense, TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library) is a self-contained library of the core journals in the field of agriculture. It is available at cost ONLY to research institutions in the developing countries. It is a system being produced at Mann Library at Cornell University with the cooperation of many scientific publishers, database producers and the Rockefeller Foundation. In the larger sense, however, TEEAL is the solution to a problem. In the last decade, there has been a huge investment in research and education in the developing countries. The goal has been to make the research and education programs in these countries self-sustaining. In spite of the monumental strides made in improving these programs, little has been accomplished in bringing these countries access to the world’s scholarly publishing. Without access to the scientific literature, researchers in the developing countries cannot know that solutions to the problems they are struggling with have already been found by others. Many students from the developing countries come to the United States and Europe to complete their graduate work. Upon returning to their own countries, they no longer have access to the literature that they have relied upon for their work. Providing access to the literature is a key to the success of research programs in the developing countries, but providing access to literature in all fields was too great an undertaking. So which fields were the most criti-cal? The research area most fundamental to the improvement of conditions in many of the developing countries is food production and nutrition. Thus, the choice was made to focus on this literature (Olsen, 1994). By gathering the opinions of over 600 scholars in the field of agriculture, with 250 scientists focusing on the developing countries, the most important literature was identified. The work to identify the core literature of agriculture began at Mann Library in 1988, and beginning in 1991 a multi-volume series, The Literature of the Agricul