The FAO Open Archive: Enhancing the Access to FAO Publications Using International Standards and Exchange Protocols

Since 1998, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has been publishing its electronic publications in the FAO Corporate Document Repository (CDR). The electronic publishing workflow is maintained by the Electronic Information Management System (EIMS). The EIMS-CDR holds more than 38 500 documents and is the gateway to FAO's publications. The EIMS-CDR coexists with the FAODOC – the online catalogue for documents produced by FAO. FAODOC catalogues and indexes both electronic and printed documents while the EIMS-CDR manages full text documents and a minimal set of metadata. This paper discusses the merger of the EIMS-CDR and the FAODOC into a unique FAO Open Archive based on the integration of the electronic publishing and the bibliographic cataloguing requirements. The FAO Open Archive will be the foundation for the collection, management, maintenance and timely dissemination of material published by FAO. To improve the effectiveness of the proposed repository, it is necessary to streamline the current electronic publishing workflow. The merger of the EIMS-CDR and the FAODOC will strengthen FAO’s role as a knowledge dissemination organization. Especially, as one of the principal tasks of the FAO is to efficiently collect and disseminate information regarding food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries and forestry.