Lalitpur, August 22:

The National Agricultural and Research Council (NARC) has recently brought a 300-gigabyte external hard drive from the Cornell University’s Albert R Mann Library in the USA to upgrade its library into an electronic library through a local network.

The hard drive cost $1,000, said Bhola Man Singh Basnet, agronomist and principal scientist at the NARC. It is called LanTEEAL (Local Area Network-The Essential Electronic Agricultural

Library). He said that the LanTEEAL will facilitate researchers and the NARC officials to read agricultural journals published between 1993 and 2005 worldwide.

The NARC had TEEAL in a Compact Disk (CD), which is a compilation of over 150 full text journals related to agriculture. Basnet said the LanTEEAL contains 115 key agricultural journals chosen by 600 world scientists as highly relevant in the developing world.

“To maintain its copyright, we have decided to use the drive and its electronic journals only within our premises,” said Basnet who is also the chief of Communication, Publication and Documentation Division at NARC. The NARC library is also facilitating TU and some 25 organisations by providing abstracts, he said.

According to the Cornell University, this library is available to over 100 eligible developing countries.