ILOILO CITY -- A news index on aquatic and marine related news is now available online with the efforts of the library staff of the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center-Aquaculture Department (SEAFDEC-AQD).
The Aquatic News Index (ANI), which is being maintained by the SEAFDEC-AQD library, contains aquatic science-related newspaper articles.
In an interview Monday, Data Bank Senior Information Assistant Stephen B. Alayon said they will index all publications in newspapers, starting with Business Mirror, Business World, Malaya, Manila Bulletin, Manila Standard, Manila Times, Philippine Daily Inquirer and Philippine Star.
They will also include two local newspapers, the Daily Guardian and the Panay News.
“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,” he said.
Alayon said they will try to analyze the news and even the use of jargons to comprehend the content of the publication.
He added that entries are grouped according to a newspaper source.
The subject description will be assigned using the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstract Thesaurus while the geographic names are assigned using the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.
“We assigned subjects and since we respect the copyright, we only have the extract, not the full text of it. 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,” he added.
Alayon said news reporters can benefit from index should they want to find historical news data, which contains the name of the publisher, subject, important names and agencies mentioned in the news and the writer.
“If you are a reporter and you want to search your profile in the Google Scholar, you will find the article and point you to the ANI (ani.seafdec.org.ph). If you searches for a certain topic, you can find articles about the subject on the repository,” he said.
In addition to aquatic and marine sciences topics, the index also covers other topics like climate change and red tide, among others.
The index will try to cover publications from 1973 up to the present but will start with the recent ones.
In the Philippines, Alayon said there are two similar initiatives -- the Computerized Index to Philippine Periodicals and Index to Philippine Newspapers which was published by the University of the Philippines and Ateneo but is not indexed in Google Scholar.
The index was launched last week in time for the 45th founding anniversary of SEAFDEC. (PNA)
