The GFAR Document Repository is a digital instrument used by the GFAR Secretariat to disseminate its digital collections of documents capturing and preserving the intellectual output of the GFAR Secretariat.

The project builds on an initiative of the GFAR Secretariat in collaboration with the Library and Documentation Systems Division of FAO which has provided a customized version of the EIMS (Electronic Information Management System).  It is database driven and it interfaces with the web through XML.

The EIMS provided the necessary workflow and the metadata element set needed for describing the digital documents, as well as the implementation of the GFAR taxonomy and the AGROVOC Thesaurus for describing the content of the publications.

The new repository supports XML exports compliant to both EIMS (Dublin Core) and AGRIS AP formats.
Thanks to the AGRIS AP export, GFAR is now an AGRIS Center (see the AGRIS Network)

Exports of GFAR publication to RSS feeds have also been implemented (see below).

The main functionalities of the system are:

• Authors can publish their documents and make them visible on the web to all the world
• Documents are inserted in the system following information management standards (i.e. AGRIS AP and terminology standards (i. e. AGROVOC)
• Access to the document is preserved by producing the minimal metadata record
• Electronic documents are saved and preserved in a file server
• The search can be customized according to different needs

The documentation is organized according to the GFAR Taxonomy, which has also been mapped to AGROVOC.
The preparation of a glossary to define the main ARD keywords is also planned and special queries will be formulated providing documentation from other electronic databases.


The RSS feeds of GFAR publications

Pre-defined feeds 
Some pre-defined feeds are available as cached RSS feeds (updated every 3 hours) for fast harvesting: see here.

Dynamic feeds
Please use this feature with caution. Harvesting dynamic feeds at close intervals could cause too much load on our server and we might have to stop the service in the future.
The base url is http://egfar.org/egfar/inc/docRepRSS (this loads a default feed of the latest 50 records - feeds containing a larger number of records should be called only at long intervals as they require time and memory)..
A good way to filter the feed is using parameters. The following parameters are accepted:
- QueryString (searches the title, abstract and author fields: for the moment, only a one-word search is accepted)
- Title (for the moment, only a one-word search is accepted)
- Pub_year (publication year) 
- recordsperpage (the number of records you want to retrieve: please limit it to 50 maximum)
- Pub_id (only if you know the ID in the repository: it is useful if you want to retrieve a single record)
The sort order is by publishing year / submission date descending.
The RSS format is RSS 2.0 + Dublin Core namespace (particularly, dc:creator and dc:subject). 
A good example of a useful feed for "recent publications from GFAR" would be:
http://egfar.org/egfar/inc/docRepRSS?recordsperpage=20
 
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Related documents:

The GFAR Document Repository

Selection Guidelines for Submission of Documents in GFAR Bibliographic database

GFAR Bibliographic database submission guidelines