I.S. Lupinovich Belarus Agricultural Library

The article is devoted to the study of the national libraries work in the conditions of the new coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic. The author describes the ways national libraries choose different methods of working with users, develop innovative services, expand the repertoire of information resources / products, and take measures to ensure the safe work of employees, including the remote work. The analysis of both general and specific decisions on the organization of work, made by various libraries around the world in the context of the pandemic-induced constraints is given. Topical issues of library activities during this period are discussed. The dates of the recurring closure of a number of national libraries of the world and the basic rules of work in them as of November 15, 2021 are given, as well as data from 2 surveys among 55 national libraries of the world about how they were affected by the situation with COVID-19. It is shown that these surveys provided an understanding of how the world's national libraries have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak and the impact the pandemic has had on these organizations. The article outlines the most frequently cited pandemic issues for national libraries at the moment and in the near future. It is emphasized that the reopening of libraries may be temporary and the risk of new sanitary restrictions should always be borne in mind

The article presents the system for the development of information literacy for different groups of users of the scientific library and librarians (using the example of training activities held in Belarus Agricultural Library). The main informational skills and abilities that students, graduate students, scientists and specialists should possess are listed. The characteristics of seminars and presentations on the development of information literacy are given, with a description of the practical and theoretical parts. The influence of the level of information competence of users on the quality of scientific research is emphasized. The role of information literacy in the formation of professional consciousness of library specialists is shown. The advantages of the remote form of holding events in modern conditions are revealed. The necessity of constantly increasing the level of information skills in scientific libraries is substantiated.

The definitions and the essence of such concepts as "a branch", "a mobile library", and "a lending point" as applied to the historical realities of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, are revealed in the reference literature. On the basis of archival documents the forms of outreach services which were used in the Belarusian Republican Scientific Agricultural Library during the mentioned period were revealed; the number and places of functioning (names) of each of the forms of outreach service by years were determined.

The role of automation in the library collection acquisition procedure is considered. An interactive structure of acquisition of the library fund is proposed, its functions are revealed.

The role of non-material assets in increasing library’s competitiveness and relevance is examined. The specific character of modern concepts of staff management making the basis for the philosophy of organizational non-material assets management is emphasized. The examples of associative coupling of librarian’s professional individualization with his/her personal brand as one of the library’s non-material assets are given. Tools for libraries’ self-assessment and evaluation of their non-material assets for systematic development (both of individual libraries and the country’s libraries on the whole) are proposed.

The article presents the main stages of work on the formation of an authority database «Agricultural Scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus». A process chart for the creation of an authority record for an individual author in IRBIS64 LAS is proposed. The experience of the Belarus Agricultural Library in organizing Web-IRBIS64-based online access to the authoritative database is presented.

Features of preparing reference lists for scientific publications of international level are discussed. International standards for creating bibliographical references are listed. The main styles of making references are presented: Harvard Style recommended by the British Standards Institute and the Modern Language Association; APA Style developed by the American Psychological Association. The general rules for bibliographic references in Harvard Style and APA Style are listed.

The article describes the discourse features of abstracts of scientific papers on agriculture: logicality, abstractness, performativity, terminology, specific sentence length, structural categories and components. It was found that the logicality was achieved due to contrastive, elaborative, inferential and temporal discourse markers in the abstracts of the scientific publications on agriculture in the English language. The abstractness was expressed by the predominance of indefinite or zero articles and the use of words describing processes and phenomena. The terminology of the abstracts of the scientific articles on agricultural topics was described in accordance with the following classification: 1) well-known terms; 2) special professional terms; 3) abbreviations. The performativity was manifested in the first person material presentation using general science clichés. The predominance of sentences the length of which ranges from 16 to 25 words was observed in the abstracts of the scientific articles on the agricultural topics. It was found that most of these abstracts were characterized by the following structural components: background (72%), aims (73%), research methods and materials (62%), results (80%), conclusions (58%).

Scientometric indicators are nowadays an almost mandatory element in assessing the scientific activity of a scientist or an academic organization, and scientometric methods are actively used in various studies in the field of science studies, including bibliometric studies. The article analyses the three largest citation systems. The Belarusian publications on agriculture selected from Web of Science, Scopus and RSCI scientometric databases for the period 1991-2021 have been studied in detail. Articles were analyzed by subject, publishing organizations, authors, year of publication, types of publications, and other parameters. Based on the results obtained, it was concluded that the number of publications and the number of their citations is growing every year. This indicates the growing publication activity of the authors. However, Belarusian authors prefer to publish in Russian-language editions that are not included articlein foreign information resources. This indicates the need for their further promotion in the world information systems. At the same time, the reflection of publications with the participation of Belarusian authors in international information resources undoubtedly has a positive effect on the status of national science in the system of global scientific communications.

The article presented the basic parameters of a software complex of multi-streaming processing of scientific information for servicing the users of the Belarus Agricultural Library developed at the United Institute of Informatics Problems of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.

Periodical and serial publications play an important role in the collection on agriculture and related branches of Belarus Agricultural Library. The article describes the acquisition of professional periodicals, their accounting and archival storage. The problems of acquisition of the library collection during the pandemic are discussed. The impact of established economic and social factors on the receipt of periodicals and serials in printed form in the library collection is highlighted. The acquisition of electronic periodicals is analyzed. The advantages and disadvantages of electronic periodicals and serials are highlighted.

The article presents the main areas of educational activities in the Belarus Agricultural Library. The library has long-term experience in organizing and carrying out advanced training courses on the programme «Information and Software Support for Professional Activities (Librarianship)». Examples of interaction between the library and educational institutions are given. The article illustrates the informational support of quality educational processes in the agrarian institutions of higher education rendered due to their servicing under the agreements for the provision of paid library and information services.

The article considers the experience of international cooperation of the State Institution «I.S. Lupinovich Belarus Agricultural Library» of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (BelAL) on exchange of publications. The main techniques and difficulties of the realized activities are outlined; the analysis of its advantages is given; data on partner countries and the scope of exchange of publications are presented; the main ways of its implementation are described.

Most agricultural periodicals do not adhere to recommendations for the design of a scientific journal recognized by world standards, and do not have adequate information platforms for interacting with both search engines and international citation indices. On June 5, 2020 State Institution “I.S. Lupinovich Belarus Agricultural Library” of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus was appointed the executor of generation and filling the “Portal of publications of the Department of Agrarian Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus”. The portal will consist of two elements. The first element is the portal itself, which will provide unified information about the new, most cited and viewed articles on agricultural topics, agricultural science news and will have a single search line for all materials posted on the portal. The second element is completely self-contained scientific journal sites. Each of the journals included in the project will receive its own separate site, which will fully comply with modern scientific publishing practices and the requirements of international scientific databases. The “Portal of the publications of the Department of Agrarian Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus” and the sites of the journals will be developed in conjunction with the system of comprehensive support and support of the scientific journal “Elpub” Non-for-profit partnership “National Electronic Information Consortium”. The library has signed an agreement on cooperation with four organizations of the Department of Agrarian Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus to provide materials published in their journals for filling the portal and sites. The implementation of this project will serve as a foundation for the future entry of Belarusian scientific agricultural journals into international scientific databases and will help to acquaint the world scientific community with the developments of Belarusian agrarian scientists.

The main stages of a project on creation of an authoritative database «Agricultural Scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus» are outlined. The results of the realized work are presented. Participation of the Belarus Agricultural Library in the formation of the corporate database «Scientists of Belarus» is shown within the framework of its information cooperation with the National Library of Belarus.

Scientific libraries initiate and organize professional events. International scientific conferences are the most prestigious and large-scale in terms of audience coverage and geographical spread. As a rule, such events have a certain frequency and theme. The Belarusian Agricultural Library has been holding the International scientific conference "Libraries in the information society: preserving traditions and developing new technologies" since 2014 once every two years in December. Since 2016, each conference has its own theme of the year, dedicated to the most relevant direction in the library and information sphere of the current time. The article provides summarizing and analytical information on the results of five conferences (2014–2022), concerning scientific and organizational aspects of the preparation and holding of these events, as well as the preparation, publication and promotion of conference proceedings.

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of English language metadata of 18 Belarusian academic periodicals on agricultural topics, including the following information about the authors: last name, first name, patronymic; individual identifier; email; academic degrees and titles; affiliation, positions, postal address of the organization. As a result of the study, the problem of unification of the English language information about the authors both between the periodicals and within them was discovered. Some disagreements were connected with formatting, for example, the order and use of abbreviations when indicating the last name, first name and patronymic of the authors. Other disagreements were related to the translation of the metadata from Russian into English. The translation of academic degrees of the authors of publications caused the greatest disagreements. The participation of scientific libraries in solving this problem was proposed through the organization of interaction between authors, editors and library and information specialists on the issues of preparation of the English language metadata of publications, including information about the authors.

The article considers participation of Belarus Agricultural Library (BelAL) in integrating results of Belarusian scientific studies into the global information space by preparing article metadata for the international database AGRIS. The main attention was paid to such a mandatory metadata component as an abstract in the English language. The analysis of the abstracts of scientific articles in the English language indicates that most of them are characterized by a small volume and low information content. To solve this problem the library proposes not only editing scientific abstracts, but also conducting seminars on academic writing in the English language for authors. The article also presents an experience of BelAL in conducting a seminar on abstract writing in the English language, as well as plans for conducting seminars on other metadata writing.

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.

The article discusses the historical background for the development of the AGROVOC multilingual thesaurus on agriculture. The history of the creation and the specifics of work on the AGROVOC thesaurus in the 1980s and 1990s are outlined. Brief characteristics of the printed versions of the thesaurus are given: thematic range and type of links in the thesaurus, dynamics of quantitative and qualitative composition, expansion of linguistic variety of AGROVOC versions during the first 20 years of its existence.