Locating and Using Agricultural Resources

In this webinar participants will learn how to access geographies such as places within a county, census tracts within a town, and block groups within a census tract. Participants will also learn the differences between the geographies.

This webinar introduces the National Agricultural Library Thesaurus. Participants will learn about Thesaurus structure, usability, and how to use the search features at the Thesaurus website.

Join staff from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) to learn about some of the Center’s principal resources, projects, data sets, publications, and more. NOAA’s NCDC maintains the world's largest climate data archive and provides climatological services and data to every sector of the United States economy and to users worldwide. Records in the archive range from paleoclimatic data, to centuries-old journals, to data less than an hour old. The Center's mission is to preserve these data and make them available to the public, business, industry, government, and researchers .

This webinar describes the history and customers of the NAL. It includes an in-depth description of NAL’s current services, information products, and tools. Viewers will learn about the information resources and tools freely available to them via the web. These include the PubAG repository of agricultural research articles, the AGRICOLA periodical index, the specialty Information Centers, and information tools such as the NAL thesaurus.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Library provides reference services and instructional sessions to library users on finding print, digital, and online library materials. As library materials become more available in online and digital databases, finding print, CD-ROM, and online subscription library materials has become more challenging for library users. Online content is indexed and available as full-text content. However, there are many databases to navigate and many journals, conference proceedings, government reports, and other series that are only partially available as full-text content, and some citations are never captured in any, or very few, bibliographic databases. Additionally, database interfaces and access to subscription databases can change from year to year. Luckily, many library users ask for help, resulting in time savings and thorough instruction for science and engineering inquiries. This presentation is an overview of the print, digital, and online information sources used in the USGS Denver Library during reference inquiries.

The USGS Library provides reference services and instructional sessions to library users on finding print, digital, and online library materials. This webinar focuses on how to find and use information sources and products related to water use, surface water, groundwater, water quality, floods, droughts, and hurricanes (data, databases, publications, maps, and field and laboratory methods). The webinar also covers education tools available from the USGS and other geoscience stakeholders.

This webinar provides an introduction to the Web Soil Survey application. Viewers will learn how to create Areas of Interest (AOIs) to define the region to be investigated; how to create suitability maps on topics such as Building Site Development, Vegetative Productivity and Waste Management; and how to have the application create a report, compiling the information into a personalized PDF reminiscent of the paper Soil Surveys.

The Ag Data Commons (https://data.nal.usda.gov/) is a data access system maintained by the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Agricultural Library, and holds data files managed directly by NAL and also links to datasets and resources located on other websites. They have a series of short instructional videos that cover searching, creating, and submitting datasets to the Ag Data commons

The Ag Data Commons, from the National Agricultural Library, offers a monthly webinar with topics ranging from introduction for new users to topics with a data management or curation focus

NASS has resources available about understanding agricultural statistics. They have publications on understanding crop forecasts, the NASS Survey program, and a Series of Articles for Nontechnical Readers. These articles were originally written in 1989 to communicate key statistical concepts of NASS surveys to nontechnical readers. 

This user guide will provide an introduction to the data archive, availability of the research data, how to browse the data, how to use the file formats and metadata.