The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has more than 50 years of experience in the collection, production and diffusion of information on agriculture and related sciences. To facilitate access to FAO publications the Organization has implemented two document repositories: the FAO Online Catalogue (FAODOC) and the FAO Corporate Document Repository (CDR).

FAODOC produces since 1945 high quality metadata for both its electronic and printed documents. The CDR contains full-text publications and uses a workflow system based on the Electronic Information Management System (EIMS) to collect (minimal) metadata through the course of the document/publication production process.

Both systems take care of the same group of documents: FAO publications. This harms the proper dissemination of FAO publications. In addition it means efforts are duplicated in cataloguing and maintaining different databases. Therefore it was decided to merge the content of the CDR-EIMS and the FAODOC in one repository: the FAO Open Archive (FAO OA), a digital, open repository to collect, manage, maintain and disseminate all material published by FAO.

This page describes the process of merging the two systems, each with a different structure and workflow procedure, into the FAO OA. The first step towards creating the FAO OA was to analyze the CDR-EIMS and FAODOC in order to find similarities and differences. Then a workflow which integrated electronic publishing and cataloguing was established and an overall architecture in which all the features that were previously managed through CDR-EIMS and FAODOC was designed.

Another substantial part of the process consisted of identifying an open source software that would meet the requirements at as well the FAO OA as the FAO organizational level. An evaluation of open source software packages was carried out and Fedora Commons emerged as the best candidate. Subsequently the FAO Content Model could be defined, generally based on the Fedora Digital Object and the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).

The FAO OA project provided the possibility to clearly identify FAO organizational requirements for the storage, dissemination and preservation of documents and bibliographic metadata. At the same time it provided the occasion to evaluate state-of-the-art tools for the management of digital repositories and to identify the most appropriate vocabulary and metadata standards.