Capturing and sharing learning from the fields

Speaking today in the IAALD world congress, Jorge Jorge Chavez-Tapur explained why and how ILEIA promotes better documentation of agricultural practices and learning.

His starting points: despite the recognition of the importance of agriculture and calls for us to avoid 'business as usual' - most of the 'unusual' and innovative practices already happening are hardly visible.

"If we go to the field, we see millions of these interesting learning experiences, but hardly any of them are captured and shared"

Hence, ILEIA promotes and supports efforts to identify, document and share these experiences. (More ...)

A key issue, one that is not usually acknowledged, is the issue of ownership - 'too much' ownership by an individual or an organization is one of the many reasons why these experiences are not openly shared.

ILEIA's repository on sustainable agriculture

At yesterday's informal meeting on 'Making Agricultural Information Available and Accessible,'Wilma Roem explained how the LEISA repository of ILEIA and its 6 partner organizations works to make accessible the practical information on sustainable agriculture they have created in the past 25 years.

Through the www.leisa.info website, they make accessible a repository of 4100 full text multilingual articles from the journals published by the network partners (located in different parts of the world). This is both the recent ‘born digital’ material as well as older content that has been ‘re-born digital’ through digitization.

Their repository contains full text documents in PDF and html formats; they encourage translation and re-use of the content, they recently introduced RSS feeds on different topics, and the whole system is OAI compliant.

In early 2008, ILEIA did a review of the websites. This revealed a mass of good content that was not as visible as it could be. To address this, some of the new tools they introduced were:

• Google analytics – to better understand visitors and trends
• Google site map – to better expose the content to Google’s search engines
• Social bookmarking with delicious
• RSS feeds
• A new and improved search page

View Wilma's presentation:

Listen to Wilma speaking on the LEISA portal earlier in 2008.

More from the 13 November meeting

Story by Peter Ballantyne