SIDALC (Alliance of Agricultural Information Services of Americas)

What is the Alliance of Agricultural Information and Documentation Services of the Americas?

SIDALC is an international alliance of information services in which institutions from 29 countries in the Americas share their agricultural, livestock, forestry and environmental information. Created in 1999, today SIDALC is one of the most important sources of knowledge and information for agriculture in LAC both on the web and offline. Lead by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture in Costa Rica.

SIDALC’s success lies in the fact that it has taken advantage of the intellectual capital of 174 national institutions and national networks that, acting as intermediaries in the management and dissemination of information, continually expand and modernize their services in light of the new paradigms of the “knowledge society”.

Because of this, SIDALC is the largest community of information specialists interested in providing services openly around the globe. They collaborate with one another, “sharing a little so that all can have more,” while conserving their identity and policies.

At present, SIDALC is open to the public, at www.sidalc.net (no subscription required), permitting on-line searches of available digital collections, including more than 3.1 million full-text documents. Furthermore, SIDALC is linked to other information systems and networks in a number of countries of the Americas, which provides stakeholders in agriculture and rural territories with a direct response to their information needs from reference desks around LAC.