1 FAO’s role in Information Management and Dissemination – Challenges, Innovation, Success, Lessons Learned Gauri Salokhe, Antonella Pastore, Barbara Richards, Sarah Weatherley, Anne Aubert, Johannes Keizer, Andrew Nadeau, Stephen Katz, Stephen Rudgard, Anton Mangstl {Gauri.Salokhe, Antonella.Pastore, Barbara.Richards, Sarah.Weatherley ,Anne.Aubert, Johannes.Keizer, Andrew.Nadeau, Stephen.Katz, Stephen.Rudgard, Anton.Mangstl}@fao.org Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy http://www.fao.org/ ABSTRACT This article does not attempt to offer a complete description of FAO’s activities in the area of information management and dissemination. Instead, it tries to share some of the challenges faced in trying to manage the vast amount of information produced by FAO. This includes online publishing using current standards, ensuring information systems are driven by user needs and preferences, and facilitating information sharing. The paper presents lessons learned and goes on to present the idea of how the organization plans to move towards greater coherence, bringing standards, tools and methodologies for information exchange together under the auspices of an information management standards clearinghouse. The high costs of producing metadata systems is not new, the aim is to bring these costs down by reusing information management standards and reusing the metadata to provide users with new and better value-added services. Additionally, in response to the added requests for support at national levels for improving the information management infrastructure, FAO has responded with the first of a series of e-learning kits for information professionals to develop and improve their capacity to manage agricultural information. 1. INTRODUCTION Today, more than 80 low-income developing countries suffer from chronic food deficits and over 840 million people go hungry. In 1996 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) held the World Food Summit [1] where world leaders gathered in Rome and committed their countries to reducing the number of hungry by half by the year 2015. FAO was seen to play a major role towards this objective by encouraging and monitoring progress, and re-focussing its own programmes on the goals of the Summit. To better guide its work for the two decades following the World Food Summit, FAO developed “The Strategic Framework for FAO, 2000-2015” [2], which was approved by the FAO Conference at its 30th Session in November 1999. FAO’s Strategic Framework is built on 5 major corporate strategies to: • contribute to the eradication of food insecurity and rural poverty [3]; • develop, promote and reinforce policy and regulatory frameworks for food, agriculture, fisheries and forestry; • create sustainable increases in the supply and availability of food and other products from the crop, livestock, fisheries and forestry sectors; • support the conservation, improvement and sustainable use of natural resources for food and agriculture; and • improve decision-making through the provision of information and assessments and fostering of knowledge management for food and agriculture. Having recognized information and knowledge management as one of the five key strategies to achieve the goals of the World Food Summit, FAO reinforced the World Agricultural Information Centre [4] as a corporate framework for agricultural information management and dissemination. The WAICENT framework integrates and harmonizes standards, tools and procedures for the efficient and effective management and dissemination of high- quality technical information, including relevant and reliable statistics, texts, maps, and multimedia resources. With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, there have been enormous advances in information technology and the task of managing and disseminating information in a digital environment has become increasingly complex. As a result, at FAO the following tasks are assuming greater importance: to enable better access to FAO's information resources; to promote partnerships with other agricultural information networks; and to assist FAO Member Nations to build their own capacity to manage and utilize food and agricultural information. This paper highlights some of FAO’s many activities that support these tasks.