Electronic Library, The

Purpose – The main purpose of this paper is to present the work recently carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with Associazione per la documentazione le biblioteche e gli archivi (DBA) in Italy to make web CDS/ISIS-based applications compliant with the OAI-PMH. CDS/ISIS is an Integrated Storage and Information Retrieval System of Unesco, which is widely used especially in Latin America and Africa. There are hundreds of CDS/ISIS-based application systems managing bibliographical reference, ensuring high quality content through the use of built-in authority files, data entry guidelines and validations. It also allows for metadata export in many different formats.

Design/methodology/approach – The methodology adopted included study, analysis and evaluation of three existing solutions for exposing metadata from the CDS/ISIS database repositories to the OAI framework.

Findings – The implementation did not include the development of automatic procedures for incremental harvesting from CDS/ISIS databases nor the normalization of the harvested data. However, a lot of experience in implementation of OAI was gained which will be useful for future development of non-CDS/ISIS systems.

Research limitations/implications – The research and development work demonstrates the importance and implications of this work for the whole CDS/ISIS community and specifically for the participating centres from the AGRIS network.

Originality/value – It proposes an open source, easily parametrizable plug-in tool, which can be adapted to expose metadata from a general structure CDS/ISIS database using the OAI-PMH protocol. This work assures that semantically rich metadata for agricultural science and research publications based on the “AGRIS Application Profile” can be handled by the OAI protocol. This in turn allows for further creation of additional services based on the exchange of knowledge on agricultural science and technology publications world-wide.