SEAFDEC/AQD Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center | Aquaculture Department
By Development Communication Section
An online database indexing aquatic science-related news articles appearing in various Philippine newspapers has been launched for public access during the 27th Book Launching on 12 July 2018 at SEAFDEC/AQD’s headquarters in Tigbauan, Iloilo as part of the research center’s 45th Anniversary Celebrations.
The Aquatic News Index, nicknamed ANI as an allusion to the Filipino word for harvest, is an initiative of the SEAFDEC/AQD Library to improve the accessibility of current and historical news articles on aquatic science and to preserve them in digital form.
“We will try how to save our newspaper before it ends up as a wrapper for dried fish. We will try to index our newspaper and establish an online index for ease of retrieval and citation,” said Stephen Alayon, Acting Head of SEAFDEC/AQD’s Library and Data Banking Services.
The SEAFDEC/AQD Library’ has already started indexing beginning with their collection of aquaculture and aquatic news clippings which they have accumulated since 1974.
“Since we respect the copyright, we only have the extract, not the full text of [the article]. So there is no file associated that they can download the article. But if the newspaper later on will grant us the permission to upload, much better,” said Alayon.
Entries will be grouped according to newspaper source and, to ensure accuracy and consistency of the index entries, subject descriptors were assigned using the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts thesaurus. Geographic names on the other hand, were assigned using the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.
The aquaculture news index may now be accessed through the link, ani.seafdec.org.ph.
