On 1 July 2025, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), through the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology (AGRIS), hosted the webinar entitled "Optimizing OAI-PMH Sets for Seamless Metadata Ingestion into AGRIS". This informative session was specifically designed to address the challenges and opportunities related to effective metadata harvesting, highlighting best practices for institutions seeking greater visibility and impact of their agricultural research outputs. 

The webinar started with opening remarks by Chelsea Scalese, Communications Specialist at FAO, who moderated the session and emphasized that repositories carefully configured using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) significantly enhance the accessibility and discoverability of research materials by global service providers such as AGRIS. 

Imma Subirats, AGRIS Programme Manager at FAO, delivered a comprehensive presentation explaining the technical foundations and practical significance of OAI-PMH sets.  Subirats provided participants with clear insights into frequent issues encountered by AGRIS during metadata ingestion, particularly highlighting the missing or incorrect implementation of OAI-PMH set parameters. For instance, some repositories provide metadata without structured thematic sets, resulting in the indiscriminate harvesting of content. Additionally, certain repositories exhibit sets that are incorrectly named or labeled in languages inaccessible to the broader global community, significantly limiting the metadata's usability. 

Subirats also emphasized other common challenges such as empty OAI-PMH sets, restricted access points that require authentication or IP-address verification, inconsistent metadata formatting, and encoding errors caused by improper use of UTF-8 standards. These issues create considerable obstacles for service providers like AGRIS and can lead to repositories experiencing reduced visibility in global scientific searches. Subirats underscored the necessity for repositories to implement persistent identifiers to ensure stable and long-term access to full-text resources, further enhancing the reliability of harvested metadata. 

Continuing the session, Mercy Moyo, AGRIS Focal Point for Africa, presented real-world examples illustrating best practices from selected institutions currently harvested by AGRIS. Moyo described institutions such as the Institute of Agri-Food Research and Technology (IRTA) in Spain and the University of Namibia, whose repositories successfully organize metadata clearly by content type and thematic area. This clear categorization enables AGRIS to selectively harvest agriculture-related research outputs effectively. 

FAO invites agricultural research institutions, libraries, repositories, and knowledge managers worldwide to join the AGRIS Network. By participating in AGRIS, institutions can expand the global reach and impact of their research outputs, contributing to broader knowledge sharing, international collaboration, and enhanced scientific communication in agriculture and related fields. 

Join the conversation and stay updated on AGRIS developments. Register here.