1. The FAO Open Archive Enhancing the Access to FAO Publications Using International Standards and Exchange Protocols
Claudia Nicolai, Imma Subirats and Stephen Katz
Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Rome, Italy

2. Overview What is FAO? Information and Knowledge Management at FAO
Background and Objectives for an Open Archive at FAO
Introduction of Electronic Publishing at FAO
Lessons Learned and Issues
Creating the FAO Open Archive
Next Steps

3. What is FAO?
FAO is the specialized United Nation agency that leads international efforts to defeat hunger.
FAO acts as a neutral forum where all nations meet as equals to negotiate agreements and debate policy.
FAO is also a source of knowledge and information.

4. Information and Knowledge Management at FAO
The First Article of the FAO Constitution:
“The Organization shall collect, analyse, interpret and disseminate information relating to nutrition, food and agriculture.”
The World Agricultural Information Centre provides
Tools and Standards for:
Knowledge management
Dissemination
Information exchange

5. WWW.FAO.ORG WWW.FAO.ORG is a huge knowledge-base 400,000 HTML files
More than 36,000 Documents (PDF and DOC)
More than 30,000 dynamic applications (JSP, ASP)
About 360,000 images (GIF, JPG, BMP)
400 multimedia resources (AVI, MPG, MOV)
Around 100 major databases (Oracle, SQL, ISIS)
In English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese!
80 Million hits (7 million 5 years ago)
3-4 Million Visits (323,000 visits 5 years ago)

6. Background FAO was an early implementer of:
an online catalogue for documents produced by FAO (FAODOC), a multilingual online catalogue which contains bibliographic metadata of FAO electronic and printed documents;
the Electronic Information Management System (EIMS), a workflow management tool and database which manages the publication of electronic documents and multimedia resources on FAO’s Web sites; and
the Corporate Document Repository (CDR), a corporate output interface for FAO full text electronic publications stored in the EIMS.

7. Objective
The objective of the FAO Open Archive is to create a unique sustainable digital repository for the dissemination of FAO publications and simultaneously, enhance interoperability with other information systems.
The FAO Open Archive should guarantee efficient electronic publishing and metadata management, the effective dissemination of FAO information resources and the preservation of the Organization’s institutional memory.
To find a strategy to solve:
the duplication of efforts in creating and managing metadata; and
the lack of integration of electronic publishing and cataloguing

8. FAODOC
The FAODOC is a multilingual, online catalogue of documents and publications produced by FAO since 1945.
The system uses UNESCO's CDS/ISIS software.
More than 160 000 documents have currently been catalogued.
Since its inception, the FAODOC has focused on the production of high quality bibliographic records.

9. EIMS
The FAO Web site was released in 1995 and the first electronic publishing workflow (through EIMS) was initiated in 1998.
Currently, more than 38 550 resources (full text documents and multimedia items) are managed by the EIMS.
Photos, videos and audio are managed by EIMS and accessible through different systems on the FAO Web site.

10. CDR - DocRep
The CDR was conceived as the online digital library of FAO electronic documents and publications, as well as selected non-FAO material.
At present, more than 23 000 full text documents are available through the CDR.

12. Statistics – CDR v. FAODOC

13. Statistics – FAODOC v. CDR

14. Some issues....
In the EIMS-CDR, each record corresponds to one document (e.g., a book or a meeting report).
The FAODOC catalogues documents and their analytics (e.g., a document is considered a book and the analytics are its chapters). Therefore, a book can have more than one record.
The content of the two databases partially overlap, resulting in duplicate bibliographic records.

15. Creating the FAO Open Archive
The FAO Open Archive is based on the integration of the electronic publishing and the bibliographic cataloguing requirements.
The process should focus on:
system architecture;
workflow procedure;
compliance with international data content standards; and
exposing metadata in a standardized way.

16. The following elements define the architecture of the system: 1
The following elements define the architecture of the system: 1. integrated workflow; from left to right, the flow of information starts from the peripheral input system elements, passes through the core of the management system and to the dissemination interfaces; 2. common database; and 3. management of the two main functions of the FAO Open Archive; electronic publishing and cataloguing.

17. The FAO Open Archive Workflow (I)

18. The FAO Open Archive Workflow (II)

19. The use of OAI-PMH
The visibility and dissemination of FAO documents will be maximized by exposing content through OAI-PMH.
OAI-PMH to expose FAO Open Archive metadata for harvesting to services providers; multiple metadata format are allowed (Dublin Core and AGRIS AP)

20. Next steps Software requirements and implementation
Design of the common database
Import of data from EIMS and FAODOC systems.
The launch of FAO Open Archive is foreseen for mid-2008.

21. Claudia Nicolai {Claudi.Nicolai@fao.org}
Imma Subirats
Stephen Katz