Library & Information Centres

The National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) currently has three fully functioned Libraries and two Information Centres. The Libraries are located at NARI’s Wet Lowlands Mainland Programme at Bubia, Morobe Province, Wet Lowland Islands Programme at Kerevat, East New Britain, and the Main Highlands Programme at Aiyura in Eastern Highlands Province. The Information Centres are located at the Dry Lowlands Programme at Laloki in the Central Province and at Mount Hagen, Western Highlands, which serves the High Altitude Highlands Programme at Tambul and Kandep (Enga Province).

The NARI Libraries and Information Centres have multiple roles:

1. Library & Information Services

our clients, most important being NARI scientists and technicians are assisted through various services

  1. Literature search (using NAIS; CAB Abstracts, Agricola, Rural & Tropag; AGORA, SDI (CTA) and others)
  2. Book loan
  3. Inter-Library Loan
  4. Photocopy

2. Outreach & Liaison Activities

  1. NARI Toktoks – assisting farmers with small booklets containing farming information, written in simple English, Tok Pisin and some translated into Hiri Motu.
  2. Attending Shows and Field Days – to cater for farmer needs for information.

National Agricultural Information System (NAIS)

The then NARI Agricultural Information System was launched in December 2000 with the consolidation of 17,827 bibliographic records from various sources into one database, managed using the DB/TextWorks software. In 2001, the PNG Coffee Industry Corporation’s Research and Growers Division [formerly Coffee Research Institute (CRI)] joined this venture.

In early 2005, the NARI/CRI Agricultural Information System was made into a National Agricultural Information System (NAIS) when five more organizations joined.

Currently there are seven partners of NAIS.

  1. Cocoa Coconut Institute of PNG (CCI)
  2. Coffee Industry Corporation (CIC)
  3. Department of Agriculture and Livestock (DAL)
  4. National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI)
  5. New Britain Palm Oil Ltd (NBPOL)
  6. PNG Oil Palm Research Association (PNGOPRA)
  7. Ramu Sugar Ltd

The system comprises a library catalogue of over 30,000 records of books, journal articles, trial reports and other information resources of 19 library collections in the partner institutions. The system also contains some records of the ANU Land Management Group in Canberra.

NAIS also has records of over 609 titles published by 18 PNG institutions, including NARI, DAL, CIC and others. The system comprises of five components:

  1. a co-operative library catalogue database
  2. a publications database of six publishers (DAL, NARI, CIC, FPDC, CCI & LLB)
  3. a bibliographic database of Pacific agricultural journal articles (from 1920)
  4. a database of researchers and other specialists in Papua New Guinea
  5. a database of institutions and their capabilities in Papua New Guinea

These databases can be accessed by scientists and those in search for information from the NARI Information Centres located at various agro-ecological zones of PNG and from other NAIS partners. A runtime version of NAIS on CD can be obtained from the NARI Librarian.

To know more about the system, go to http://www.pngnais.org.