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AGRICULTURAL INFORMATION NETWORKS IN ZAMBIA (ZAR4DIN) AND GHANA (GAINS)

Joel Sam

Director, Institute for Scientific and Technological Information, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Accra, Ghana

Justin Chisenga

Information Management Specialist, Food and Agriculture Organization Regional Office for Africa Accra, Ghana

Valeria Pesce

Information Management Specialist, Global Forum on Agricultural Research, GFAR Secretariat, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy

Davy Simumba

Principal Biometrician, Zambia Agricultural Research Institute, Chilanga, Zambia

OUTLINE

• Background– Ghana Agricultural Information Network System– Zambia Agricultural Research for Development

Information Network• Institutional Networks and Information architecture

– Institutional policies: towards open access– Digitization and institutional repositories– Information architecture, standards and tools

• Challenges and Conclusions– Institutional Challenges– Technical Challenges

Agricultural Information Networks in Zambia (ZAR4DIN) and Ghana (GAINS) 221-May-12

BACKGROUND

• Agriculture Research for Development (AR4D) and the knowledge generated from such research are essential catalysts for accelerating agricultural production development in a country

• Efficient provision of access to relevant and timely AR4D information to research scientists contributes to quality research through which a country is able to select appropriate technologies, which if applied can help productivity, and thus contribute to the overall growth of the country’s economy.

3Agricultural Information Networks in Zambia (ZAR4DIN) and Ghana (GAINS)21-May-12

• In many developing countries, much of the AR4D output is in the form of grey literature and rarely gets distributed outside the research organizations.

• Today many opportunities are provided by the new information and communication technologies (ICTs), to make the outputs of AR4D visible outside the owner institution


Constraints:

•Lack of resources and information and communication management policies and strategies (institutional capacities); and•Lack of awareness of the opportunities presented by modern ICTs and of standards and methods to make information more accessible (human capacities).


Rationale behind the principles set forward by the CIARD initiative:

• Issues of lack of institutional capacities, human capacities and little awareness of standards and technologies to make information accessible

• Aims at making agricultural research information publicly available and accessible to all

• See the CIARD Manifesto at http://www.ciard.net/ciard-manifesto

621-May-12 Agricultural Information Networks in Zambia (ZAR4DIN) and Ghana (GAINS)

http://www.ciard.net/ciard-manifesto

“Pathways to Research Uptake”

The “Pathways” illustrate and recommend institutional policies, content management methodologies and information sharing approaches that help make research outputs visible and more accessible.


This paper illustrates how the Ghana Agricultural Information Network System (GAINS) and the Zambia Agricultural Research for Development Information Network (ZAR4DIN) projects adopted some of the recommended “paths” and contributed to the development of an integrated agricultural information system in the respective countries.


Ghana Agricultural Information Network System

• Ghana Agricultural Information Network System (GAINS) was established in 1991.

• GAINS comprises a network of libraries that include

– all the agricultural based research institutes of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR),

– faculties of agriculture of the publicly funded universities,

– the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA),

– and the Biotechnology and Nuclear Agricultural Research Institute,


GAINS Portal

A first portal was built in 2003, but in 2008 it was agreed to improve on the provision of online access to agricultural sciences and technology (AS&T) information generated in Ghana through the re-design of the GAINS portal, which was completed in 2010 under the Ghana AGRIS Pilot Project (GAPP).


GAINS Member Institutions

The GAINS member institutions on the GAPP were the CSIR-INSTI, the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG), the CSIR Forestry Research Institute of Ghana (FORIG), the CSIR Food Research Institute (FRI), the CSIR Animal Research Institute (ARI), the Ministry of Food and Agriculture Information Resource Centre (MOFAIR), and the College of Agriculture Education (Ashanti-Mampong) of the University of Education, Winneba.


Zambia Agricultural Research for Development Information Network

• The Zambia Agricultural Research for Development Information Network (ZAR4DIN) project was launched in January 2010


The main goal of the ZAR4DIN project was to develop a national network of institutions and individuals involved in AR4D information generation, management, dissemination and exchange in order to facilitate access to AR4D information, including metadata and full-text documents, through interlinked institutional repositories accessible through a national AR4D portal.


The pilot institutions on the project are:– the Zambia Agriculture Research Institute

(ZARI)– the National Institute for Scientific and

Industrial Research (NISIR) and – National Agricultural Information Services

(NAIS) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives


What the GAPP and ZAR4DIN have in common is that they both aimed at: a)creating (or strengthening) a network of research institutions and information managers in their respective countries; b)enabling research institutions to manage their research outputs appropriately; c)making research outputs owned by individual institutions accessible through a national portal and through international bibliographic databases


Institutional networks and information architecture


Institutional policies: towards open access

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The GAINS implemented a series of strategies aimed at gaining support for its activities towards opening access to agricultural research information and digitization initiatives.

These included:


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• Introducing the CIARD Manifesto and Values to the Committee of Directors of the CSIR research institutes in February 2009. The bulk of GAINS member institutions are CSIR agricultural-based research institutes.

• Institutional seminars on opening access to public domain agricultural scientific and technical information in three pilot institutions at which participantsincluded research scientists and management.


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• A workshop on Open Access for representatives of the pilot institutions to create awareness on the concept of public domain literature and open access publishing.

• A seminar on Copyright Management and Institutional Repositories to sensitize information technology specialists, librarians, information managers, research managers and research scientists on copyright issues that may affect provision of access to information resources in an institutional repository and introduce them to SHERPA-RoMEO facilities and Creative Commons Licensing system


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• On a positive note, MOFAIR, all the institutions participating in the GAPP project developed institutional policies and strategies for information and communication management (ICM).


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• GAINS, as a network, also developed its information and communication management/technology (ICM/T) policies and strategies, which are more favourable to opening access to agricultural sciences and technical information generated in Ghana.

These include strategies to:


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• develop mechanisms for collection of agriculture information in electronic format;

• develop institutional repositories of metadata and full-text documents of agricultural information resources;

• support national, regional, and international initiatives aimed at opening up access to agricultural information resources


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In Zambia, the results of a survey on the views of research scientists regarding open access showed that 82.5% of the respondents supported the “basic principle of open-access” and the notion of providing open-access to publications of scientific research outputs in scholarly journals by agricultural research scientists in the country.


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ZAR4DIN worked on consolidating this support in the pilot institutions, especially at NISIR and ZARI. In this regard:


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• ZAR4DIN stakeholders at the project’s inception meeting, in January 2010, proposed guidelines for promoting open access and agreed that ZAR4DIN member institutions should endeavour to collect and preserve outputs of AR4D in digital format.

• A seminar on “Opening Access to Science and Technology Research” was organized at ZARI for research scientists and research officers.


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• Senior managers in ZAR4DIN member institutions participated in a seminar on information management and knowledge sharing policies and strategies.

• NISIR and ZARI held seminars to review their ICM/T policies and related strategies to establish how they relate to national policies and strategies and how they facilitate and promote access to and dissemination of agricultural research information and knowledge generated by the institutions.


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• ZARI senior management also expressed interest in developing appropriate ICM/T policies and strategies to facilitate management of digital information resources in the institution.

• The ZAR4DIN also adopted policies to maximize the visibility, citation, usage and impact of research outputs by maximizing online access to it for all users and researchers worldwide and to ensure that all peer-reviewed research outputs including journal articles, except those protected under copyright arrangements, are to be self-archived in the institutional e-repositories.


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• ZAR4DIN member institutions signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) which, among others, allow harvesting of metadata from ZAR4DIN by service providers using Open Access Initiative-Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-MHP) to enhance wider exposure and dissemination of AR4D content from Zambia.


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Digitization and Institutional Repositories


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• To increase the availability, accessibility and applicability of research outputs, the CIARD initiative, among others, recommends to institutions to ensure that their research outputs are available digitally, and to develop institutional or thematic repositories of the outputs as open archives.


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• In this regard, all the participating institutions in GAINS’ GAPP project and ZAR4DIN developed institutional repositories.

• Tables 1 and 2 below provide statistics regarding the contents of the institutional repositories.


Institution Metadata Full-Text Documents

CSIR-ARI 328 170

CSIR-FRI 291 291

CSIR-INSTI 1178 1152

CAGRIC 589 587

CSIR-FORIG 503 503

CRIG 158 145

MOFAIR 520 6740


Table 1: GAPP - Metadata and Full-text documents in

institutional repositories January 2012

Institution Metadata Full-Text Documents

ZARI 850 100

NISIR 420 420

NAIS 120 45


Table 2: ZAR4DIN - Metadata and Full-text documents in

institutional repositories January 2012

• The ZAR4DIN Portal (http://zar4din.org) provides access to about 900 metadata records and 102 documents harvested mainly from ZARI and NISIR repositories while the GAINS Portal (http://gains-instigh.org) provides access to about 1158 metadata records and 1136 full-text documents.


Information architecture, standards and tools


• The technical architecture of the networks was deliberately conceived to be flexible and the focus was on exchange standards and interoperability rather than on the homogeneous use of specific tools.

• The information architecture comprises the information management practices adopted (metadata model, authority data for indexing, exchange standards) and the information flows (from the institutional repository to a national portal and to international bibliographic databases).


• The information management practices adopted in the GAINS and ZAR4DIN projects follow these recommendations: the national portals expose records both as XML files using the AGRIS Application Profile and through an OAI-PMH interface also using the AGRIS Application Profile; subject indexing is done using AGROVOC terms and internal authority files support the controlled management of authors, journals, publishers and conferences.


• The reason for adopting standards is the intention of sharing institutional research outputs with others and making them accessible through other search engines.

• The use of the above mentioned standards indeed helped to make the records created in the institutions participating in the two projects more visible and accessible. The XML exports from the institutional repositories are harvested into the respective national portals (http://gains-instigh.org and http://zar4din.org ) which act as one-stop shops for all the research outputs managed by the participating institutions in the country;


http://gains-instigh.org/

http://zar4din.org/

• In Zambia, in the first phase, while ZARI and NAIS installed the AgriDrupal software tool as repository management system in their institution and started cataloguing and managing their resources exploiting the cataloguing and indexing features of the tool (standard bibliographic metadata set; internal authority lists for authors, journals and conferences; integration of the AGROVOC thesaurus); NISIR catalogued their first batch of documents using Microsoft Access (which resulted in a few issues regarding the consistency and syntax of data, considering which NISIR decided to migrate all records to an AgriDrupal installation).


• Although the output formats from AgriDrupal (XML files compliant with the AGRIS Application Profile) and from Access were different, the use of a similar metadata set allowed to import the three sets of metadata records into the ZAR4DIN national portal (http://zar4din.org), thus giving access to information resources from the three institutions through one web-based portal.


http://zar4din.org/

• In Ghana, the bibliographical records to be integrated in the portal come mostly from Institutional repositories created with the WebAGRIS software, which produces XML files compliant with the AGRIS Application Profile that the GAINS portal (http://gains-instigh.org) can import. At the moment, the portal gives access to records coming from CSIR-INSTI. The portal will also give access to four searchable online metadata databases (AGRIEX, GHASAB, GHAGRI and THESIS) containing records from member institutions.


http://gains-instigh.org/

• WebAGRIS is a system for distributed data input, management and dissemination of metadata on information objects: http://aims.fao.org/tools/webagris-2


http://aims.fao.org/tools/webagris-2

• AgriDrupal is both a “suite of solutions” for agricultural information management and dissemination, built on the Drupal Content Management System, and the community of practice around these solutions: http://aims.fao.org/tools/agridrupal

• AGROVOC is the world’s most comprehensive multilingual agricultural vocabulary: http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc/about

• http://www.fao.org/docrep/008/ae909e/ae909e00.htm


http://aims.fao.org/tools/agridrupal

http://aims.fao.org/standards/agrovoc/about

Challenges and Conclusions

•Institutional Challenges•Technical Challenges


Institutional Challenges

•Low Commitment of Pilot Institutional Heads•Lack of Institutional ICT/M Policy and Workflows •Inadequately trained human resources •Absence of Clear IPR/Copyright Guidelines


Technical Challenges

•Integration of data in the national portals.•Although most of the records came from software tools that produce standard outputs that can be easily imported and integrated into other platforms, the issue in some cases was not the metadata model but the actual data


• The availability of experienced and dedicated cataloguers also made a difference in this respect: most institutions in Ghana had experienced cataloguers dedicated to the job, which resulted in very rich bibliographic records, while in some other institutions the time that the cataloguers could devote to the project was limited and many of them also had to help with the digitization of the printed material, which didn’t allow them to specialize in their task.


In conclusion, the agricultural information networks in Zambia and Ghana have shown how working towards adopting appropriate institutional policies, content management methodologies, and information sharing approaches that follow the “Pathways to Research Uptake” proposed by the CIARD initiative, could contribute to the development and strengthening of integrated agricultural research information systems in the countries.


THANK YOU


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