Making our agricultural information accessible

Yesterday a small group of aginfo enthusiasts met at Wageningen UR to exchange experiences on the ways they make their information more accessible. It offered a rich insight into some practicalities of becoming ‘truly accessible’ – as the CIARD initiative calls on us to be.

IAALD Board member Barbara Hutchinson opened, explaining AgNIC’s ‘born digital’ and ‘re-born digital’ initiatives that aim to provide “persistent long-term access" to the research outputs of US agricultural research and extension. She particularly highlighted the issue of ‘link rot’ – where after even a short period, many web resources can no longer be found via their URL. See her presentation; and further reading.

Ingeborg Nagel and Harry Heemskerk introduced ‘Search4Dev’ a new repository that the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) will soon launch. “For Dutch development organizations”, the new site will harvest and make accessible a much wider set of outputs than is normally found in research and academic repositories. The project is a close collaboration with DPRN and their ‘global-connections’ portal. The Dutch national Royal Library will take care of the long term preservation of the repository content.  See their presentation.

Hugo Besemer of WUR explained two projects from Wageningen UR: ‘Wageningen Yield’ and ‘Groen Kennisnet’ – or ‘green knowledge net.’ The former is the primary system/repository of WUR, where according to Besemer, they “make public whatever we can.”

Hugo's colleague Ger Naber introduced the world soil information database at ISRIC. According to Naber, this was a "small library" whose content - soil maps and related resources - was only accessible to people that visited. For the past two years, the emphasis has shifted towards digital resources and services - 'bringing the services to the people'. Much of the emphasis now is on ‘re-born digital’ efforts: They have started digitizing maps and reports of Senegal, Mozambique, Fiji and Jamaica. The ISRIC database can be searched at http://library.wur.nl/isric/.

Continuing the agricultural focus, 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.

Finally, we switched from what Hugo Besemer called the ‘data layer’ of repositories to the ‘services layer’ with our next speaker. CTA’s Kevin Painting introduced the www.news4dev.org RSS aggregator that takes content from different collections and repositories, making it even more accessible. For more information and a video interview with Kevin, read this earlier story.

Peter Ballantyne shares some take away ideas from the discussions.

More from the 13 November meeting

Story by Peter Ballantyne

Making our aginfo permanently accessible?

In Yesterday's small meeting in Wageningen, we discussed ways to make information more accessible.

What were some take away messages from the presentations and discussion?

1. A fundamental challenge is for each organization to provide or guarantee permanent access to their own outputs, the publicly funded ones at least. When URL’s change, we can of course search for their new locations. But isn’t there a responsibility of ‘publishers’ to give their content permanent addresses? The model where WUR provides a de facto permanent national archive of Dutch agricultural outputs – through its e-store - is perhaps interesting to explore elsewhere. Even as organizations re-vamp their web sites, moving and even deleting outputs, they all remain accessible in one reliable location.

2. Even in this small group, there were lots of different ways to make information more accessible, with varying levels of success, as well as questions posed and answered. Koen Beelen suggested we need to use a ‘combination of tricks’; there’s probably also a relatively standard ‘recipe’ out there that we can all use, and contribute to. We need to document the concrete ‘pathways to accessibility’ that work, understanding why, and adapting and replicating them on a large scale. CIARD perhaps provides a framework for some of this.

3. Beyond policies, it seems even the choice of publishing format is important. PDF is popular but needs to be opened to allow the content to be extracted/searched. HTML is good for all bandwidths. Some formats are more open and permanent than others.

4. These issues will be discussed again in a session at the CGIAR annual meetings in Mozambique at the end of November. Looking further forward, both the IAALD Africa Chapter and AIBDA plan to discuss ‘opening access’ strategies and issues at their meetings in Ghana and Peru in 2009. Good opportunities to advance the agenda.

More from the 13 November meeting

by Peter Ballantyne

The WUR WaY makes agricultural knowledge accessible

Yesterday's meeting on aginfo accessibility was a good opportunity to hear more about experiences in this area of Wageningen UR.

Hugo Besemer shared experiences with two projects: ‘Wageningen Yield' (see also earlier story) and ‘Groen Kennisnet’ – or ‘green knowledge net.’

It seems that the Wageningen repository is now rather complete – they collect and index all resources created by WUR staff, even if they can’t yet make them all publicly accessible (due to license restrictions etc). For some other organizations, like the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, whose web site content management system changes often, WUR maintains an accessible ‘e-store’ of full text documents, giving them each a permanent address on the web.

According to Besemer, the key to success so far is the way the data collection process is embedded in the institution’s science reporting systems. The reporting cycle requires that outputs are submitted to the system and an individual in each science group is tasked to submit information to the database (the library does quality and consistency checks).

This reporting ‘stick’ is also complemented by ‘carrots’ or incentives offered back to the science groups and their staff. The idea is to make it easier for them to do other things with their own content. As examples:

• individuals and groups can generate their own publication lists, with full text links etc, from the database;
  
• they can also use the system to generate other required reports of outputs they need to submit for annual reports etc.
  
• the library also ensures that the research outputs be found elsewhere, in other repositories and systems, via rss feeds, etc. The scientists and groups can count on their outputs getting maximum dissemination and exposure.

See Hugo's WaY presentation:

More from the 13 November meeting

Story by Peter Ballantyne

NL Meeting - Making Agricultural Information Available and Accessible

On 13 November 2008, Wageningen UR Library and IAALD held an informal roundtable for people and organizations involved with agricultural & natural resources information in an international context. It focused on efforts to make documents and other information resources truly accessible.

See related posts:

Making our agricultural information accessible

Making our aginfo permanently accessible

The WUR WaY makes agricultural knowledge accessible

ILEIA's repository on sustainable agriculture


See related presentations

The Wageningen Way: Accessing Dutch agricultural information

Wageningen Yield (WaY) is the access point to publications from Wageningen University and Research Centre. WaY contains references to publications authored by Wageningen University staff from 1976 onwards, including many in full text.

WaY encourages authors to publish according to the Open Access Principle. Content in WaY can also be harvested according to the OAI-PMH protocol. Access to each research unit's outputs is enhanced through RSS feeds listed from the 'browse' option on the menu.

Beyond search an retrieval, the service shows how staff publications and reports can be searched and sorted to provide publication lists, by author, research team or research theme. Academic staff contributing to the system can therefore get something back...

Rethinking the Agricultural Library

Many visitors to Wageningen in the Netherlands will recall their visits to the Jan Kopshuis - site of the Wageningen University Library. On 21 February, the new library space was opened with a special congress held in the Forum building.

NAL Director Peter Young was keynote speaker at the congress - talking on 'Transforming Knowledge Services for the Digital Age : Redefining the Research Library.' Wageningen library's own blogger Wouter Gerritisma reports on Young's presentation, he also covered the other presentations (in Dutch).

Peter Young's conclusion on web 2.0 - that we need to "focus on the library in the user environment rather than the user in the library environment" was picked up by several of the bloggers at the meeting (download Young's powerpoint.

Tags: agricultural information libraries wageningen