Tell us something about yourself... what is your background and role in the organization you are working for?

Information scientist and librarian degree, MSc in digital information and documentation, as well as 12 years of experience in information management and databases. My personal interest in information science field is focused on digital information retrieval and standardization and interoperability among library systems. I am employed as an information scientist in IRTA (Institute for Food and Agricultural Research and Technology) for 7 years; it is a Public Corporation of the Catalan government (Catalonia, Spain). I currently work in the IRTA’s Watching Technology and Business Intelligence Unit, working on information management for strategic decision making within the organization, through systematic capturing, managing, analyzing and exploiting of useful information.

How did you get in contact with AIMS?

Through the FAO website. Seven years ago, when I started working at IRTA, I had to create a documentation center, and I was interested in, and needed to find, sources of information at both a national and international level in the field of agriculture and related sciences; among them was FAO. At the same time, there was the need to know how they dealt with information management. Through the FAO search engine, I promptly found AIMS.

What is your opinion on AIMS?

From my point of view, AIMS is becoming as essential information platform for professionals in libraries and documentation centers specialized in the agricultural and related sciences field. In addition, it is helping to network different professionals (through subscription groups) in the field of information management and standards. AIMS helps agricultural information professionals to gain new knowledge and professional skills.

According to you, what is the most important benefit that AIMS provides to the agricultural information management community?

At a professional level, it gives us new information resources (standards, vocabularies, news and events, tools, etc), that helps individuals to keep to date and acquire new knowledge, such as linked data movement and related semantic standards. In the workplace, in daily work, not only does it provide resources such as AGROVOC for indexing and retrieval of information, but it also keeps us informed of new projects such as new information systems (portals, repositories, etc.) that can help us with information discovery and covering information users’ needs.

How do you think that information management standards can contribute to agricultural research for development?

Information management standards form the basis for access, dissemination, discovery and search and retrieval of information. Moreover, thanks to the emergence of new standards, such as linked data standards, it is possible to share and link different kind of data such as bibliographic, biodiversity, geopolitical, statistical data, etc. (e.g. OpenAgris). In general, standards make possible the dissemination and exchange of scientific knowledge between different information systems (interoperability) or between the user and the systems (or viceversa). Thus they enable knowledge to be well disseminated and consequently, help to grow agricultural research for development.