About Us

 

Who produces TEEAL?

TEEAL is a project of Cornell University's Albert R. Mann Library in cooperation with over 60 major scientific publishers, societies and index providers. Over the years, critical financial support has been provided by the Rockefeller Foundation. Please see our Donors and Partners page for more information about the foundations and groups that have made it possible for institutions around the world to purchase TEEAL.

The TEEAL Project is administered through Mann Library’s Collection and Services Department, where a small staff oversee production, distribution, outreach and training. ITOCA (Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa), in Pretoria, South Africa, conducts awareness and training missions all over the African continent.

Jaron Porciello
Project Director

Jaron has been with the TEEAL project since 2009, and received her MLS and MA from Indiana University. In addition to being the TEEAL project director, she also works closely with the ACCI/WACCI (African Centre for Crop Improvement/West African Centre for Crop Improvement) institutes and other international collaborations.

Elaine Guidero
Production Coordinator

Elaine runs the technical aspects of TEEAL, and manages the creation and shipping of the annual updates.

Nicole Joos
Regional Coordinator in Latin America and the Caribbean

Nicole was formerly the TEEAL Project Director, but has since moved to Costa Rica, where she now serves as the integral TEEAL coordinator in LAC. Nicole works primarly with the Inter-American Institute for the Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).

 

Project history

The idea for TEEAL arose in the 1980s. It was the brainchild of Wallace and Jan Olsen, former Senior Research Associate at and Director of Mann Library, respectively. During travels to developing countries, the Olsens witnessed non-existent, outdated and spotty agricultural journal collections—a direct result of shrinking library budgets, inconsistent donor funding, and increasing subscription costs. Faculty and researchers only had access to print copies of serials that were years, if not decades, out of date. They knew that long-term improvements in food security and agricultural development would not be possible without giving scientists better access to current research.

While mailing print copies of journals was an impractical and prohibitively expensive solution, and both Internet and local area network access were yet not readily available or reliable in most developing country institutions, compact disc (CD-ROM) media offered an efficient storage and delivery mechanism for hundreds of thousands of full-text articles organized within a database.

The journals titles in TEEAL, which are considered among the most essential to research and education conducted in the developing world, were first selected by citation analysis and then reviewed by some 600 scholars from all over the world. In 1999, the TEEAL Project sold its first “Library in a Box”— 130 journals with 600,000 pages of articles, stored on 100 compact discs—to the University of Zimbabwe.

In 2005, to keep up with improvements in technology infrastructure in many developing countries, the TEEAL Project introduced a next-generation system that could be operated on a local area network, dubbed LanTEEAL. Rather than being stored on CDs, the entire database is stored on an external hard drive. LanTEEAL has been a big success with more than 70 purchased by institutions since July 2005. As of 2009, we have released an upgraded version, simply known as TEEAL.

Annual updates are produced by Mann Library using revenue from sales of sets.

 

Advisory Board

Robert Herdt, Chair

Adjunct Professor, Department of Applied Economics and Management
College of Agriculture & Life Sciences
Cornell University

W. Ronnie Coffman

Chair, Department of Plant Breeding & Director, International Programs
College of Agriculture & Life Sciences
Cornell University

Carl K. Eicher

University Distinguished Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics
Michigan State University

Gebisa Ejeta

Professor, Department of Agronomy
Purdue University

Curtis Farrar

International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Aboubacar Toure

INTSORMIL Host Country Coordinator
IER, Sotuba Research Station, Mali

Janet McCue

Associate University Librarian for Teaching, Research, and Outreach
Cornell University

Mary Ochs

Director, Albert R. Mann Library
Cornell University