In Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences there are 50 research institutes and establishments with the staff of 21 thousand persons in the aggregate. The Central Scientific Agricultural Library is a structural division of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the largest agricultural library in territory of Siberia and Far East. The library carries out functions regional branch depository of the agricultural literature, branch center of the interlibrary loan. Since 1973 CSAL SB RAAS carries out the consulting assistance to more than 120 agricultural libraries of Siberia and Far East

Within the last ten years there is a tendency of reduction of number of libraries and their employees. Taking into consideration the staff of our library the total number of the librarians in agricultural information systems in the region is 512 persons.

Nevertheless the library actively utilized domestic and foreign databases on CD-ROM: "AGROS", "Russian summary catalogue the scientific and technical literature", "Electronic catalogue SPSTB SD RAS', "Current Contents", "Agriculture", "Biology", and " Environmental Sciences " and " Citation Report " to provide its users with the necessary information. Since 1999 the Library is connected to the Internet and has already satisfied several dozens of information requests from regional R&D institutes.

In the near future we plan to introduce the system of corporate cataloguing of the regional libraries and to continue the cooperation with CSAL RAAS on the use of branch information resources and development of new information technologies.