Metadata in Forestry in Canada

The Canadian Forest Service Library Network has started a meta-
search of forestry resources at http://metafore2.nrcan-rncan.gc.ca . This site searches a catalog of over a million documents in the seven libraries in the network (libraries are located in Victoria British Columbia, Edmonton Alberta, Sault Ste- Marie and Ottawa in Ontario, Quebec City in Quebec, Fredericton in New- Brunswick, and Corner Brook in Newfoundland.)

After you've passed the language preference splash page (which allows you to choose between English, French, and Spanish), you
can do a simple search by keyword, limiting your results by certain variables including publication date, language location of keyword, and type of document. And that's just the simple search. The advanced search is similar but offers three text inputs.

Search results are broken down by network library; there's an option to merge results from all the libraries but I couldn't get that to work. I also had the annoying experience of getting a search result, and then clicking on the link for results and getting "no documents found." I think this happened because I was searching for only one kind of document. Search results list the name of the article and date. Clicking on the library link provides additional information including the holding library and whether or not the item is available.

If you're not interested in searching the catalog, check out the selected e-dictionary and selected journals lists. The selected journals list is really good -- I wish it had more annotation.

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