On the publications area

The Forum’s document repository is a database of our publications with access to the full-text digital document.
The repository is the result of collaboration between the Global Forum’s Secretariat and the former FAO’s Library and Documentation Systems Division (WAICENT), who kindly provided us with a customized version of their Electronic Information Management System (EIMS). It is database driven and it interfaces with the web through XML.

A brief technical overview

The EIMS provides the necessary workflow and the metadata element set needed to describe the digital documents. It also implements the Forum’s taxonomy and the AGROVOC Thesaurus used to subject-index the content of the publications.

The repository supports XML exports compliant to both EIMS (Dublin Core) and AGRIS AP formats. Thanks to the AGRIS AP export, the GFAR repository is an AGRIS Center and its documents are available in the Agris search engine. 

RSS feeds have also been created to make GFAR publications available to other sites (see below).

The main functionalities of the system are:

  • Documents can be published and made visible on the web world wide
  • Documents are managed in the system following information management standards (i.e. AGRIS AP metadata model) 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.


Feeds from the repository

An RSS feed of the latest 50 documents uploaded to the repository is available at:
http://egfar.org/rss/documents
If you want to retrieve all of the publications, you can do it in batches of 50 by adding ?page=n to the RSS URL, n being the page number.
So for instance if you want the last-but-one batch of 50 documents type:
http://egfar.org/rss/documents?page=2

We will soon publish instructions on how to obtain specific subsets of documents as RSS.


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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