One Year of Efforts for Digital Preservation at FAO

Transcription

1 One Year of Efforts for Digital Preservation at FAO Claudia Nicolai, Rachele Oriente, Fernando Serván. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

2 Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations FAO was founded in 1943 at Hot Springs (USA) during the UN Conference on Food and Agriculture, and it was formally instituted during the First Session of the FAO Conference, held in Quebec, Canada, in 1945

3 Washington was selected as the temporary Headquarters for FAO Sites had been offered by Denmark, Italy, Switzerland and the United States Rome was selected by a very small margin. International Institute of Agriculture established in 1905 by David Lubin. FAO Library is still considered one of the world's finest collections in food, agriculture and international development.

4 FAO s mandate raise the level of nutrition, improve agricultural productivity, better the lives of rural populations and contribute to the sustainable growth of the world economy.

5 What is FAO? FAO is a knowledge organization and regards itself as a source of knowledge and information in the field of agriculture, commodities, nutrition and sustainable development among others. FAO is mandated to preserve the information it produces, collects from its member countries and is funded by its donor countries.

6 DP challenges in FAO 1/4 STRUCTURE FAO is composed of seven departments: Agriculture and Consumer Protection; Economic and Social Development; Fisheries and Aquaculture; Forestry; Corporate Services, Human Resources and Finance; Natural Resources Management and Environment; and Technical Cooperation. Besides its headquarters in Rome, FAO is present in over 130 countries. 5 regional offices 1. Africa, 2. The Near East, 3.Europe and Central Asia 4. Latin America and the Caribbean, 5. Asia and the Pacific 11 subregional offices, two multidisciplinary teams, 74 fully fledged country offices (excluding those hosted in regional and subregional offices), eight offices with technical officers/fao Representatives five liaison offices and four information offices in developed countries.

7 DP challenges in FAO 2/4 DIGITAL ASSETS over 4 millions Web pages 46,000 publications 120,000 bibliographic references Country s data on Agriculture since 1945 and in some cases even older data. Data series on Commodity balances, Food balance sheets, Food Supply, Forestry, Fisheries, Investment, Population, Prices, Production, Resources, Trade. over 47,800 photos 1,450 audio files 7,500 videos Over 390 applications/databases GIS, maps,

8 DP challenges in FAO 3/4 LANGUAGE COVERAGE English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian Over 60 additional languages FAO publications Other, 1297 Russian, 1188 Chinese, 3688 Arabic, 4304 English, Spanish, 7683 French, 8978

9 DP challenges in FAO 4/4 Management support Budget cuts Re-organization of FAO Cultural challenge (information producers commitment)

10 What did we do? 1/2 Learning the basics of Digital Preservation Problem statement was prepared to elicit management support (and funding)

11 What did we do? 2/2 UN Survey Identified collections (grab the low hanging fruit)

12 Collaboration with UN Agencies Survey UN Agencies target group (25 Agencies, 44 individuals); Aims at taking a snapshot of what UN Agencies are doing in DP. UN Workshop 2012 Exchange of experiences; Finding commonalities; Looking for collaborative opportunities;

13 Preserving FAO Web FAO Web site has evolved since its first appearance in It now has over 4 million pages and 1 million visits a month (with peaks of over 5.4 million visits per month) Information covered in the 6 official languages Access to information available on the Internet as a human right.

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17 Preserving FAO Web FAO Web sites where we have legal obligations to preserve any published content over a period of time; Obsolete FAO Web sites or those that are not regularly updated and should be removed from the web, will still be accessible but in the right context, as archived information; FAO Web sites with volatile content; Selected external sources of information that are linked from FAO web site. For example the FAO Country Profiles, in order to take a snapshot of the information on a given country at a given date; Information related to FAO's work that is available on the web, possibly including FAO related social media accounts. International Plant Protection Convention (legal obligation to preserve any published content for 10 years)

18 Preserving FAO Web Challenges Use of WCMS, everyone is a publisher Multiple copies of the same digital object are uploaded all over the Web site Not authentic and relible content Opportunities New FAO Web Strategy Re-enforcement of the role of Corporate Repositories

19 Preserving FAO publications FAO has the legal mandate to manage and preserve FAO publications; FAO publications digital content is selfdescribing and self-sustaining by virtue of its enriched metadata description; FAO OA workflow already foresees a close collaboration with information producers in the technical departments.

20 Achievements Workshop on Digital Preservation and JHOVE2, FAO HQ. Digital Preservation Problem Statement approved. Workshop to outline a plan for Digital Preservation in the Open Archive. Funding and procurement process for selecting a Web archiving service. Preservation of FAO Web as an activity in the Programme for Work and Budget Need to identify a DP strategy at organizational level acknowledged as a priority for funding for next biennium

21 Oustanding challenges Full support from management Ensure that information producers throughout the organization commit to safeguarding FAO s digital heritage by following a standardized approach to management of digital objects.

22 A Digital Preservation Strategy will support FAO in its work to end hunger through information-based solutions, by ensuring perpetual access to FAO's intellectual outputs.