An inter-agency documentary policy on water and aquatic habitats EURASLIC, Lyon, May 17th 2011 Florence Louis, Agence de l’Eau RMC – Rhône Méditerranée & Corse water agency Françoise Bunch, ONEMA – National water agency on water and aquatic environments

OUTLINE 1- National framework of water management in France Onema and its missions : Research & Development and information system : work in conjunction 2- The documentation & information center network Origins : the documentation & information center network “Fontaine” The documentation & information center network “RFCD” 3- The national portal Origins of the portal A larger project The portal : creation, evolution, documents, contributors Technical structure and adaptation : Open Archive Initiative (OAI), Dublin Core, geographical fields Improvements : search engine “Polyspot”, geographical search, saved searches

OUTLINE 1- National framework of water management in France 2- The documentation & information center network 3- The national portal

Organisational overview The main public institutional bodies for public water policy in France : The Ministry in charge of Ecology (MEDDTL) ONEMA Water Agencies in France (6)

Water management in France  The 1964 Water Law set out 6 large catchment areas for water resources management. 6 water agencies are responsible for the implementation of water policies in their basin.  The 1992 Water Law strengthened this approach with the elaboration of water planning tools for each large catchment area  The 2006 Water Law set out objectives and means to achieve good ecological and quality status : ONEMA is created

General information on ONEMA  Governmental agency overseen by the Ministry in charge of Ecology (MEDDTL)  Created by the French Water and Aquatic Environments Law, adopted on 30 December 2006 and the related Decree of 25 March 2007  All types of water systems (fresh/marine ; ground/surface)  Acting on the whole French territory, including overseas territories  Staff : 900, including 600 field technician ONEMA is the reference technical agency for knowledge and management of aquatic ecosystems

Two of its missions are to : 1 - Stimulate research and development  Water framework Directive = Results oriented policy & evidence-based policy (good ecological and quality status of water bodies by 2015)  The ONEMA and its French partners have pooled their research and development efforts to work together to preserve water quality and promote ecological well-being.  This effort generates a great number of reports which have to be made accessible (available to the public) 2 - Manage the French water information system and produce some data Onema is in charge of finding ways of sharing and pooling the information from each aquatic management institution.  The documentation & information center network  The National portal

OUTLINE 1- National framework of water management in France 2- The documentation & information center network 3- The national portal

Origins : The documentation and information center network « Fontaine » A common bibliographic database: 1993 : Creation of the database “Fontaine”- contributors : water agencies + Ministry of Environment bibliographic records of the reports produced by the Agences de l’Eau (Water Agencies) and the Water Department of the Ministry of Environment 1996 Database appears on the OIEau website 1997 Database appears on the Eaufrance website and water agency website ( bibliographic records in the pdf format ) Common rules to all contributors: 1995 All contributors must use the “water” thesaurus to index documents This thesaurus, created by the water agencies and the OIEAU contains 3200 keywords and was published in Indexing guide to fill in the fields in a standardized way 1996 A catalogue of magazines is published, listing the reviews, issue numbers, and dates available from each contributor 2003 A Water Framework guide is created and published in 2004 Copyright contract is signed 2005 A working group examines the rules concerning the public access to information. A guide is realized from legal texts.

The documentation and information center network « RFCD » The new, expanded information center network is a direct continuation of the old. It works toward the same goals and includes a larger number of contributors. Contributors: 6 water agencies, office international de l’eau, Ministry of Ecology, research establishments and Onema Documentary agencies work in conjunction with each other to share useful services such as : - the distribution of laws and legislation gathered by the Water Legislation Watch (AE AP since 2004) - the sharing of selected press articles All of the water agency documentation and information centers have decided to pool their resources and work together in order to better promote their technical and scientific publications. - through their inclusion in The national portal - and also through our documentary policy which makes provision for the selective promotion of inter-agency publications by theme starting in 2011

OUTLINE 1- National framework of water management in France 2- The documentation & information center network 3- The national portal

The portal Origins of the portal 2003 : Directive 2003/4 guarantees easy access to environmental information : The Ministry of ecology observes that public technical reports about water are unknown and inaccessible to the public. It is decided to implement Directive 2003/ : The Onema combines its own documents and those of Fontaine into one database. The project increases The working group now includes : technical librarians working in research establishments who contribute to the collaborative aquatic ecosystems database. Main goals - Look for other contributors, reference not only reports but different kinds of documents (articles, books…) - Improve document management (identification and referencing of technical reports) - Afford efficient access to pdf files, including geographical research This portal, “Les documents techniques sur l’eau”, now comprises all aforementioned public-institution databases and is managed by the Onema with technical help from Office International de l’Eau.

The portal - Online since 19 June 2009, comprises references - Today includes 40,000 references and 18,000 technical and scientific pdf documents. Numbers of references indexed from Sept 2009 to Sept 2010

The portal Kinds of documents : Reports, studies, articles, books, published in French or English (the title and the abstract has to be in French) technical or scientific documents about knowledge management and aquatic ecosystems. Current contributors : 6 water agencies, office international de l’eau, Ministry of Ecology (SIDE), office de l’eau de la Martinique, office de l’eau de la Réunion, Onema, Ifremer, Cemagref, BRGM, Gest’eau, Sandre, INRA, Ineris…

The portal:

Technical structure and adaptation of the contributors Each contributor:  is a data provider  collects its on documents (pdf or paper version)  makes its studies available on internet  provides metadata National portal (OIEau):  is a service provider  collects the metadata from the data providors  indexes the metadata  indexes full text in distant sites  provides a unique research interface OIEau Document Metadata URL links to the document consults Water Agency Documents (pdf) Metadata Only on Water Agency website Métadata URL links to the document Central Index SIDE Documents (pdf) Metadata Only on SIDE website IFREMER Documents (pdf) Metadata Only on IFREMER website ONEMA Documents (pdf) Metadata Only on ONEMA website National portal - collects the references - indexes the documents in distant sites - distributes PDF files remains on the institutions’website

Progressive adaptation of the contributors : Each contributor must: - Create and organize its own OAI repository. - Be able to manage and export metadata documents using Dublin Core format. - Create an http web server which is able to respond to simple requests by generating XML data streams. - Make documents PDF files available on contributor’s own web site.

Technical structure Dublin Core metadata is used to describe resources held, owned or produced by companies, governments and international organisations to supporting portal services or internal knowledge management. There are also implementations where Dublin Core metadata is used as a common exchange format supporting the aggregation of collections of metadata, such as the case of the Open Archive Initiative (OAI). The Dublin Core metadata standard is a simple yet effective element set for describing a wide range of networked resources. The Dublin Core standard includes two levels: Simple and Qualified.

Progressive adaptation of the contributors: Contributors must : - Register references - Obey the rules in describing documents (fields : metadata provider, document provider, URL, geographical description) Geographical fields: 4 kinds of information : - codes to describe the area - Town, county, region (administrative codes INSEE) - 3 codes to describe water - River (codes BD Carthage) - Underground water (codes BFRHF) - Lake, ponds (codes SANDRE) Finding a document : - The traditional method (words) search engine Polyspot - The geographical method (rectangle on the map or region code) - Combining both methods

Tools to help the librarians fill the geographic fields

Geographic search

Improvements - July 2010 : a new search engine Polyspot was configured - December 2010 : geographical research method was developed : - geographical research method will be on line, - new contributors will participate, - saved searches will be available with alert

Saved searches

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