AIMS Newsletter no. 23, October 2013

1st Training Workshop on Agricultural Information Management Strategies in Nicaragua

The 1st Training Workshop on Agricultural Information Management Strategies organized by the Nicaraguan Network of Agricultural Information and Documentation (RENIDA) together with FAO and the Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences (IICA) took place last week at the Centro Nacional de Información y Documentación Agropecuaria (CENIDA) in Nicaragua.

People from 20 institutions, including ministries, universities and research institutes, participated in the 3-day workshop sharing their experience and learning about the last developments and initiatives in the agricultural information management sector.

The workshop focused on Open Access, Semantic Web, Open Data and Linked Open Data. The objective was to support the agricultural information management in the region and to inform about the most important aspects influencing the creation and management of a digital library. Additionally, tools like Koha, ABCD, Eprints or the customization of DSpace AgriOcean Dspace were presented and discussed as an alternative to the current technology solutions used within the network.

Are you a member of the AIMS Community? Are you interested to know more about the last developments in agricultural information management and how to implement them in your institution? Contact us at [email protected] and we will provide you with information about how to get engaged in the next capacity development activities.

Highlights from & about the community

  • The AGORA program, set up by FAO together with major publishers, enables developing countries to gain access to an outstanding digital library collection in the fields of food, agriculture, environmental science and related social sciences, celebrates its 10th anniversary this month.
  • AGRIS, the international information system for agricultural science and technology, has reached 7 million records enriching its collection with the important agricultural literature of AGRICOLA, the database created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and maintained by the U.S. National Agricultural Library.
  • The Universiti Putra Malaysia has released the Malaysian Agricultural Repository which uses AgriOcean DSpace and currently stores 4,948 records.
  • The Metadata Standards Directory (MASDIR) Working Group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) is developing a collaborative and open directory of metadata standards used in scientific data contexts. You can participate submitting information on metadata schemes.

Upcoming Events

Glossary

What is SPARQL? An RDF query language, that is, a query language for databases, able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework format (Wikipedia)

More information:

5 Questions in 5 Minutes with Peter Pissierssens

Who are the users of AIMS and what do they think about agricultural information management standards? This month we interviewed Peter Pissierssens of the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange" (IODE) project of UNESCO-IOC.

Read the interview "We welcome RDA as a platform that allows us to make better use of data management..." with Peter Pissierssens on the AIMS Interviews section.


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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