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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

21-May-12 Agricultural Information Networks in Zambia (ZAR4DIN) and Ghana (GAINS) 2

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.


• 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

“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:
b)creating (or strengthening) a network of
research institutions and information managers
in their respective countries;
c)enabling research institutions to manage their
research outputs appropriately;
d)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

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:


• 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.

• 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

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


• 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:


• 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

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.


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


• 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.


• 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.


• 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.

• 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.


Digitization and Institutional
Repositories


• 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.


• 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.


Table 1: GAPP - Metadata and Full-text documents in
institutional repositories January 2012

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 2: ZAR4DIN - Metadata and Full-text documents in
institutional repositories January 2012

Institution Metadata Full-Text
Documents
ZARI 850 100
NISIR 420 420
NAIS 120 45


• 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;

• 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.


• 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.


• WebAGRIS is a system for distributed data
input, management and dissemination of
metadata on information objects:
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.h
tm


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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