The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO is one of the United Nation’s co-sponsoring partners for the Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA). This is an abstracting and indexing service covering the world's literature on the science, technology, management, and conservation of marine, brackish water, and freshwater resources and environments, including their socio-economic and legal aspects. The ASFA bibliographic database contains over 820,000 references, with coverage since 1971 (some 800,000 are computer searchable from 1973 onwards). About 3,500 new bibliographic references are added each month to the database. Each bibliographic reference includes: the title of the document in its original language (all non-English titles are also translated into English), an English language and/or non-English language abstract and subject, taxonomic and geographic index entries as relevant. ASFA is produced through the co-operative efforts of the following ASFA Partners (see list in Annex I). The overall objective of the ASFA Partnership is to disseminate information on aquatic sciences and fisheries to the world community, bearing in mind the special interests of developing countries in this field. All the ASFA Partners are represented on the ASFA Advisory Board which meets once a year to decide upon, and oversee the implementation of policy matters with respect to the ASFA service. The secretariat for the board is provided by FAO. The ASFA database is produced by Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) on contract with FAO. The publishing and marketing of the ASFA CD-ROM products are carried out (under contract to CSA) by 2 CD-ROM publishers: SilverPlatter and NISC. The priority of ASFA identified by the ASFA Advisory Board are: (i) Expansion of the ASFA Partnership, (ii) Improve the Coverage, Accuracy, Timeliness etc. of ASFA (iii) Coordinate the maintenance of the ASFA inputting tools, and (iv) Expanding the dissemination and use of the ASFA information products. |
