The NAL Agricultural Thesaurus (NALT) antecedent, the Agricultural-Biological Vocabulary was first published in August 1967 by the the National Agricultural Library for use in indexing and cataloging. In 2002, it was released online as the National Agricultural Library Thesaurus and Glossary, and became known as "NALT". The vocabulary has in-depth coverage of agriculture, biology, and related disciplines. The Spanish language version of NALT was first published in May 2007 under the Spanish language name "Tesauro Agrícola", and was created in cooperation with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), and Latin American agricultural institutions of the Agriculture Information and Documentation Service of the Americas (SIDALC). In 2022 NALT was redesigned as part of the Library's "NALT for the Machine Age" initiative and released as NALT Concept Space, a state-of-the-art multischeme semantic system with added features for expanded usage with tabular data, in addition to traditional text (indexing and cataloging) data. The semantic structure allows for multiple domain specific vocabularies within the NALT Concept Space, and is standardized for data interoperability, enhanced scalability, and machine readability. Inaugural NALT vocabularies included NALT Core, and NALT Full, with more domains to be added each year. "NALT Core", is a trim NALT vocabulary and was first published in 2022 when it included 14,196 of the most frequently used agricultural concepts, including 4,396 agriculturally important organisms (taxa), for a lean and efficient machine readable agricultural knowledge base.

January 31, 2022

July 16, 2024

NALT Core

NALT Core