From:	Pepe, Richard (FIES)
Sent:	15 January 2009 17:20
To:	ASFA-Board-L
Subject:	Some new Year's News and Comments

Dear ASFA Partners, 

We hope this e-mail finds you healthy and smiling - at least sometimes - considering these sad times of war and world-wide financial gloom. 
We also hope you are ready for another year of ASFA fun and games (i.e. have you adjusted your FRN numbers for 2009, as Helen suggested you do in her last post to the ASFA-Board-L? Also, she tells me to remind you (as always) to report to FAO any and all changes to the list of journal titles that you have agreed to monitor (e.g. if you stop monitoring a journal, or a journal changes name, or if you find a new title to monitor - let us know!).

1. As of yesterday, there were 1, 305,095 records on the ASFA database. What's more - most of the ASFA Partners, who were singled out at the last ASFA Board Meeting for not producing ASFA input (and therefore were in danger or almost in danger of being removed from the ASFA Partnership), have now restarted to submit input! 

2. Interest in joining ASFA is still alive. Some preliminary contacts and correspondence is under way by the ASFA Secretariat and also on our behalf by some of the ASFA Partners, but nothing really concrete has so far emerged, except for an institute in Bulgaria which has officially requested to join ASFA. The processing of this request is pending due to staff shortages in the FAO ASFA Secretariat. 

3. The full 2007 ASFA Board Meeting Report was printed and distributed late (real late). The 2008 Meeting Report will be published sooner. The draft of the full report should go out to the meeting participants for their comments by the end of this month with finalization by end of February. Notwithstanding the late publication of the full Reports of the Board meetings, the "Action Items" agreed at the Meeting have always been sent out to all Partners within one week after the Meeting finishes (which is very good), so there are no excuses for anyone not knowing what was agreed and/or what they agreed to do at either the 2007 or 2008 Meetings.
 
4. The 2009 ASFA Board Meeting. As you know, the 2009 ASFA Advisory Board Meeting will be hosted by our ASFA Partner in Goa, India (National Institute of Oceanography). The dates are not yet finalized, but will most probably be in September. 

Agenda. It is not too early to be thinking about the Agenda and/or the eventual theme(s) of the Meeting. Yes, the Agenda does always contain numerous standard items, but there is NO ban on you suggesting/adding new items! Also the discussion/seminar/workshop day (now held on the 4th day of the Meeting) is open to almost any kind of ASFA related material/discussion or perhaps even a guest speaker. Attached is the standard ASFA Agenda to get you thinking. Even if you don't have suggestions for new items you might want to annotate the Agenda items (i.e. list what you think should be covered/discussed under a certain agenda item).  

Theme(s) (Agenda item 7.7). So far, as regards potential theme(s) for the Meeting, one suggestion has comes from Neil Kaske (NOAA), who suggested "the concepts and methods used to evaluate libraries and information services". Perhaps, he will give a short talk on this subject or re-present one of his past writings on the topic. Is there anyone else interested in or wanting to contribute to this topic? If so, perhaps you and Neil could lead a discussion? Note, this is not an assignment, just a suggestion.

Some topics will always be relevant (or underlying) to all ASFA discussions are listed below (maybe they should  become agenda items?) 
- the future of ASFA /  the continuity of ASFA / the uniqueness of ASFA  (i.e. identifying and strengthening the unique aspects of ASFA (its grey literature input) to keep it viable in the face of other web based information sources) 
- full-text linking
- scanning
- role of Web 2.0 tools and services in ASFA
- searching ASFA with ontology, facets etc. (this would depend more on ProQuest user interface) than ASFA Partners
- etc

5. FAO FTP site. On the FAO FTP site, there is the beginning of an ASFA calendar (only two months)  ftp://ext-ftp.fao.org/FI/Data/FIES/  folder ASFA Calendar 2009 .  You can download the January and February calendar pages and personalize them for you own use (i.e translate into your own language, insert your own national holidays, birthdays etc. us etc..).
Unfortunately, you cannot, at the moment, upload (i.e. directly send) your own calendar pages (files) to the FAO FTP site. In other words, at the moment if you want to compose and send a calendar page (e.g. March) for inclusion on the FTP site, you have to send it to me first. Then, I will put it on the FTP site. (Important note - you will soon be able to directly put (upload) files onto an FAO FTP site which is "reserved" for ASFA - see next item-6)

In any case, start thinking of calendar ideas for the remaining months or even alternative pages for my already posted Jan. and Feb.  There is no reason that there cannot be many different calendar ideas for the same month, and then one downloads the one he/she prefers. Sofia Levashova suggested compiling calendar months that include/indicate all the important days/discoveries/people in the history of oceanography and aquatic sciences of all the ASFA partner's country.

6.  new Reserved FAO FTP site for ASFA Partners (soon to open to you). At the last Board Meeting, it was suggested that FAO set up a place on its web page for Partners to use and share information (e.g. where a Partner can list the titles books, journals etc. that it should be monitoring/inputting into ASFA, but for which it does not have time to prepare the input, in this case another ASFA can volunteer to do that book and then cancel it from the list).
In other words, we should set up a "shared" or Wiki-like site. The FAO site developers cannot immediately set up a true Wiki-like site (although one is under development), because they must follow precise FAO rules, procedures etc.which takes a lot of time.  So, in the meantime, we shall have to settle for an FTP site reserved for ASFA, because it is quick-to-set-up and informal.  

The simple ASFA FTP site will allow the ASFA Secretariat and/or ASFA Partners, for example, to post a list. Another Partner can download the list and edit it, and then reload the list on the FTP site with the changes. Yes, I know, this is not true real time interactivity - but it's a start. And as I said, a "real" Wiki-like page, with editing tools etc,. is well on its way to completion by the FAO Fisheries Dept. FIGIS group which will then be adopted by all of the FAO Fisheries Department if needed.  

The reserved ASFA FTP site will be up and functioning very very soon. When it is, I shall then notify you and provide you with the username and password for uploading. In the meantime, we all can start discussing how to use the FTP site and or start preparing lists .

(note regarding the existing FAO FTP site (i.e. where we usually put the ASFA Meeting papers for you to download). Yes, this is also an FAO FTP site, but it is not a "reserved" site for ASFA which means that the contents are automatically emptied after 2 months (if I don't add something to it) and you personally cannot add items to the site. So the new reserved FTP ASFA site will be ours (i.e. ASFA's) and the contents will not be cancelled, and you will be able to upload files to it. The ASFA Meeting papers will in the future be posted on the reserved FTP ASFA site (I am told we can set up varies folders).   

7. www-ISIS-ASFA software.  At the last Board Meeting, It was agreed to make some small improvements to the www-ISIS-ASFA software (add some export-import utilities, and some extra fields for URL addresses etc.). Dr Rybinski (ICIE) has done his work, but we in the FAO ASFA Secretariat are a bit behind in testing and checking it.
Library Management System - There was also talk at the Board Meeting of linking the www-ISIS-ASFA software to the Library Management System WEBLIS. 
I have decided to temporarily suspend further action in this direction considering the recent successful conclusion of the ISIS-3 Conference and the new developments around the ISIS software and the launching of the ABCD integrated library management package. There are pros and cons for both systems. There is an FAO staff member (not within the ASFA group), but within the FAO information division, who is studying the question.  

8. Regarding the funds available for the scanning of grey Literature that was agreed a few ASFA Board Meetings back, still no one has come forward with a workable proposal. 

Regards, 
Richard Pepe 
Fishery Information Officer (Editor-in-Chief ASFA) 
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Fisheries and Aquaculture Department
Fisheries and Aquaculture Economics and Policy Division (FIE)
Fisheries and Aquaculture Information and Statistics Service (FIES)
Via delle Terme di Caracalla
00153, Rome, Italy
 
Telephone:    +(39) 0657051 (operator) Telephone: +(39)  06570 56380(direct) 
Fax number:  +(39) 06570 52476 
E-mail:   richard.pepe@fao.org 
(FAO) http://www.fao.org / (Fisheries Department) http://www.fao.org/fi 
Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) http://www.fao.org/fi/asfa/asfa.asp