AIMS Newsletter no. 12, September 2012

Open Access Week 2012 @ AIMS: Call for experiences

During Open Access Week 2012, AIMS will focus on the theme "Making Agricultural Research Information Publicly Available and Accessible”. We will organize a serie of webinars and highlight on our website stories on Open Access (OA) in the agricultural domain. You are invited to send us your experiences and good practices at [email protected]. Submission deadline in English, French or Spanish (400/500 words): September 17. Throughout OA Week we will publish your stories on our website and/or invite you to present it as a webinar. Share your OA experiences with the agricultural community! More info...

Highlights

AGROVOC 2012 edition released. The new AGROVOC 2012 version contains 625,096 terms in 22 languages, among them Malaysian, Telugu, and Turkish. More info...

IWMI submits new set of bibliographic data to AGRIS. The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) submitted a new set of bibliographic records to the AGRIS repository, referencing to open access publications from the IWMI Library Catalog, with relevant hyperlinks to the full-text. The data is now published and available at AGRIS. More info...

PPT in English and Chinese on LODE-BD. At the Shanghai International Library Forum, held in China, July 17-19, 2012, Marcia Zeng introduced LODE-BD at her planery session presentation entitled "Contributing to the smart city through linked library data" (PPT). More info...

HTML version of the AGRIS List of Serials (1975-2011).The AGRIS Team published an HTML version of the AGRIS List of Serials, containing updated and extended information about the AGRIS journals from its triplestore. The list consists of 16,389 serial titles information, and includes all the serials added to AGRIS from 1975 until 2011. More info...

AGRIS Open Data licensed. AGRIS recently published its dataset using a Semantic Web/Linked Open Data (LOD) approach in which records are converted into RDF and published on the Web in machine-readable formats. A great way for AGRIS to increase its coverage, but it needs a clear licensing model that meets the formal provenance demands of the Semantic Web.Therefore AGRIS is now disseminating AGRIS data with an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license. More info...

VIVO 2012 highlights.VIVO 2012 took place this year in Miami (USA), August 22-24. Valeria Pesce of GFAR blogged on the highlights of the conference: 1. Alignment of standards for describing researchers and identifying them: VIVO, CERIF, CASRAI and ORCID; 2. Two interesting keynote speeches at the VIVO 2012 conference on making unseen knowledge visible and re-defining "openness"; 3. VIVO 2012 conference, semantic track: a modelling exercise for the rationale behind AgriVIVO.

Get latest news from AIMS by topic. You can now get the latest news and contributions from AIMS by topic. This new function allows you to subscribe to a subject of interest and receive related posts by e-mail. More info...

CIARD RING China workshops. The CIARD RING China working group organized two workshops in June and July 2012 to raise awareness on the objectives of the CIARD RING and train staff of Chinese agricultural science Institutions in the use of the RING portal. More info...

Upcoming Events

Glossary

What are Open Access Journals? Peer-reviewed, online scholarly journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access.

More information:

Follow the ‘Open Access Resources by theme’ page on AIMS to discover more OA Journals resources.

5 Questions in 5 Minutes with Jarmo Saarikko

The AIMS website received its 500th registered user last month: Jarmo Saarikko of the Finnish Forest Research Institute (Metla) Library. To mark the occasion Mr Saariko has kindly agreed to tell us something about his background, relation with AIMS and thoughts about the benefits of agricultural information management standards.

Tell us something about yourself... what is your background and role in the organization you are working for?
I am originally a researcher in zoology. I switched profession and became an information specialist in 1994. Since then I have worked in the Finnish Forest Research Institute, Metla, in various information management tasks. First years I worked in projects and participated in the development of our website. Since 2006 I've worked full-time in the library and information service. I've also networked actively with library and information professionals both in Finland and internationally. As the library staff is small we have to handle all tasks in the service. Our current special projects deal with downsizing our printed collections, digitizing printed journals of Metla and establishing an open institutional repository for the digitized material.

How did you get in contact with AIMS?
I participated in the early development of the Global Forest Information Service GFIS by IUFRO and was in touch with FAO knowledge specialists already in the late 1990's. I have tried to keep an eye on the various information and knowledge management projects of FAO. Now I hope to add in some volunteer effort in bringing my own language Finnish to a more visible and official status e.g. in AGROVOC thus making it more visible and usable also in Finland. Also, I might need to have first hand experience of this service in a development project in Africa.

What is your opinion on AIMS?
This is a great tool for people working with information management in both small and large agricultural institutions. Also AIMS communities will ease in finding other professionals struggling with similar problems.

According to you, what is the most important benefit that AIMS provides to the agricultural information management community?
It provides services which would be out of reach otherwise. Information management tools combined with free software packages for library tasks provide new possibilities of information sharing and management and providing tools to document and share invaluable information on indigenous agricultural and species usage knowledge from developing countries.

How do you think agricultural information management standards can contribute to agricultural research for development?
Smaller institutions with just a few staff or in developing countries in general, cannot develop systems of their own. Providing this type of services standardizes information services on a global level which is important as information sharing through openaccess repositories becomes more prevalent. Standardized ways of information management may also improve information literacy.

The scope of the AIMS Newsletter is to bring under the attention of the AIMS community recent news, events and achievements in the field of agricultural information management. If you have any contribution, suggestion, or need assistance with the newsletter, please contact us at [email protected]

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