In 2010 FAO and UNESCO-IOC/IODE decided to collaborate on customizing DSpace. The main reasons:

• Both organizations support synergistic document repository communities with similar metadata standards and controlled vocabularies: the AGRIS (FAO) and Odin- OceanDocs (UNESCO-IOC) communities.

• Both organizations were independently of each other working on a customization of DSpace. In 2004 the Hasselt University Library in Belgium produced for IODE a customized version of DSpace called OceanDocs and adapted it to the standards of the oceanographic community. FAO on the other hand customized in collaboration with the Indian Statistical Institute in 2007 DSpace as a tool for AGRIS centres using the AGRIS Application Profile (AP). In collaboration with Kasetsart University in Thailand, FAO also developed an AGROVOC thesaurus plug-in for DSpace 1.5.2 (source code available on Google Code).

It made sense to join efforts and integrate in a common repository software the best of both worlds.

Creating AgriOcean DSpace together

The Hasselt University Library and the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas (Ukraine) provided the customization of DSpace 1.7.1 (JSPUI version) which is now available on Google Code in source code and as an easy-to-install version for Windows under Downloads.

FAO provided high quality metadata - Dublin Core, AGRIS AP and MODS - to be OAI-PMH compliant. In edition it set-up an AgriOcean DSpace group of interest on AIMS to exchange information and experiences among the involved institutions.