CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI6)

An open archive for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: disseminating enriched metadata and full text documents

Not scheduled

University of Geneva

Speaker

Imma Subirats (FAO of the United Nations)

Description

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) maintains a number of heterogeneous document and document metadata repositories. The FAO Online Catalogue (FAOBIB) is the online catalogue for documents and publications produced by FAO since 1945, non-FAO material added to the library since 1976, and serials held in the FAO library. FAOBIB catalogues and indexes both electronic and printed documents. The three FAOBIB collections are managed by three different subsystems: FAODOC, for FAO material; FAOLIB for non-FAO material acquired by the Library and SERIALS for serials records. All FAOBIB records have been created by information management specialists (cataloguers) and contain high quality descriptive metadata. The FAO Corporate Document Repository (CDR) contains full-text publications produced by FAO technical departments. The CDR disseminates full text documents and a minimal set of metadata. The CDR uses a workflow system based on Electronic Information Management System (EIMS) to collect metadata through the course of publications production process. The objective of EIMS is to have authors or producers of documents delivering the necessary administrative and descriptive metadata. There is a lack of integration within the different bibliographical metadata repositories and the overlapping at content level implies some inconsistencies that may affect the proper dissemination of the FAO publications. In addition, the organization duplicates efforts in cataloguing and maintaining technically different systems. This poster describes the process of merging CDR and FAODOC together with the creation of an open archive compliant to international standards for cataloguing and management of bibliographic records. The result will be one sustainable digital repository offering a solid foundation for the collection, management, maintenance and timely dissemination of material published by FAO. To improve the effectiveness of the proposed repository it will be necessary to streamline the current workflow and to integrate current functions into new modules. With the establishment of this digital repository FAO will take an important step in promoting the Open Access Publishing model within the food and agriculture community.