The results of the survey conducted by FAO on the state of the art of Open Access document repositories in the agricultural domain especially in the field of semantics and technology are now available on AIMS under Advice

Objective 

The overall aim was to obtain information about the existing digital repositories in the agriculture domain with special regard to semantics and technology used. The survey contained 30 questions divided into the following thematic groups: general information, content, format and metadata, semantics, software, management.

Findings

Some general findings of the survey included:

• The responses showed that the number of repositories created increased since 2007.
• A high number of repositories were located in Europe, followed by the USA, Canada and South America. From Asia only 6 institutions, from Africa only 1.
• More than half of the content available in the repositories was open access or publicly available.
• 60% of the participating institutions have set up an open access policy.
• Journal articles and technical reports were the most common type of documents available, followed by theses, conference papers, books and book chapters.
• In the field of subject indexing 90% assigned keywords and/or geographic or subject categories to their records. Of these, 40% used only freely assigned keywords. 30% used controlled lists of subjects or geographic terms, while 30% used thesauri.
• Most of the digital repositories exposed metadata only in Dublin Core.
• AGROVOC was the most common thesaurus used by the participating institutions.
• 62% of the answering repositories did not use any authority control at all for bibliographical data.  Only 40% used some sort of authority control, especially for Journal titles.
• DSpace was used by 30% of participating institutions, 16% chose to produce a local solution and 11% use EPrints.
• OpenDOAR was the registry most commonly used together with ROAR, but 18% of the participants confirmed that they have not yet registered their digital repository.

Survey continued in time

To ensure that this survey is continued in time and does not remain a one-time effort, for each repository a rich metadata record was added to the CIARD RINGwhich can be updated at all times by logging-in at CIARD

If you have any questions are comments regarding the survey results, please add a comment down below. We would appreciate your contribution highly!

Foto: Flying books (Flickr)