Even though the building is physically closed, our staff of librarians, data scientists, technical information specialists, and administrative professionals are working remotely, and safely, to deliver NAL’s products and services to you.
Agriculture plays a vital role in our everyday lives. The NAL staff are here to help answer food and agriculture questions from our customers across the nation and around the world. During these challenging times, the staff and the collections are continuously and virtually available to provide the information needed to facilitate the creation of new agricultural knowledge.
What this means is that NAL staff are still adding indexed literature citations to AGRICOLA, our searchable catalog of articles and monographs. Through PubAg, we continue to make available full-text, peer-reviewed literature in the agricultural sciences, much of which was created by USDA or USDA-funded researchers. And if you are looking for agriculture-related open research data, you can find it in the Ag Data Commons.
To support our USDA employees, NAL continues to provide access to a large portfolio of scientific journals, citation databases, and other news and information resources through DigiTop, an online customer portal to licensed publisher content (USDA access only).
National Agricultural Library
NAL maintains a wide variety of unique historical materials, many of which are now available online through the NAL Digital Collections (NALDC). One of our more beautiful and popular collections is the USDA Pomological Watercolors Collection. Or, you might also want to check out other unique materials available in our Special Collections or learn more about a variety of historical topics in agriculture through our online Exhibits.
The NAL website (https://www.nal.usda.gov/main/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery) is the portal to the resources mentioned above and much more. Our NAL customer service staff are standing by at agref@usda.gov or through our “Ask a Question” form to respond to your information needs.
Until our physical spaces open again, we look forward to continuing to serve you online.
Stay safe!