Comparing agricola by vendor

AGRICOLA is a widely used bibliographic database of over 4,000,000 records covering all aspects of agriculture and related sciences. In addition to free access via the National Agricultural Library’s web site, AGRICOLA is available through a variety of vendors. To help librarians understand the different versions of AGRICOLA, this article compares access through CSA, Community of Science, FirstSearch, Ovid and SilverPlatter. Evaluation criteria include: search modes and limits allowed; display options; capacity to link to library catalog and document delivery services; ability to save, print, and/or e-mail search results; ability to save searches, or to search multiple databases; and availability of alert services.