Improving functionalities of AGRIS network related webpages

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) constantly strives to improve its knowledge sharing capabilities. AGRIS, one of the organization’s prime knowledge sharing tools, benefits from this. Over the past months, services pertaining to the AGRIS network have been consistently updated and improved. The network, a community of organizations that shares information about food and agriculture literature production all over the world in several languages, is currently divided in two main groups, data providers and country hubs. 

All these improvements aimed at increasing discoverability and improving the usability and visibility of AGRIS data providers and their records. Given the high usage of AGRIS (10 million page views from around the world annually), having up-to-date content on the platform allows users to find the latest publications produced by the network, while for the network it represents a chance to exchange information and data, increasing its global visibility.

To start with, the data provider registry, which contains relevant information about data providers, has been enhanced to reflect the status of data providers on their publicly visible profile pages, while newsworthy events involving them are also linked to the profile pages. Additionally, the status of data providers has been added to the data provider section of each individual metadata record in the AGRIS database. 

The login-protected institutional dashboard has been greatly improved with the aim of giving more visibility to AGRIS data providers and their activities. The dashboard allows data providers to access front-end and back-end services, such as filtering content by country and data provider, or accessing institutional statistics on page views or country visits per year. A new function has been introduced: the automatic data upload (ADU), which enables data providers to upload their records in the dashboard whenever is convenient for them, thereby simplifying the data submission process and providing data providers the ability to keep track of their own submissions.

Visibility of data providers’ organizational profiles and their collections have also been increased with a login-protected filter function located on the main AGRIS webpage. By using this feature, data providers can link or embed their collection on their website and search or browse their collections.

Last but not least, data harvesting has been strongly enhanced, automating the process of data ingestions: since May, more than one million new records were added to the database, which now contains over 13.5 million bibliographic records.