The Google/IICA partnership, with CATIE now on board as well, aims to share with the world knowledge and information about agriculture, a sector whose importance the Institute believes needs to be reassessed.
The collection constitutes an important store of knowledge related to topics of global importance such as agricultural and forest policy, agricultural marketing, food health and safety, agricultural and agroforestry technology and innovation, and the environment and natural resources management.
The Institute sent Google a first batch of nearly 3000 books at the end of 2007; a second batch of almost 6000 between March and April 2008; and a further 12,000 books during the first months of 2009.
The documents are original and unique materials. Some date from as far back as 1942, while others were published as recently as this year. The collection represents IICA’s entire institutional memory in its 34 Member States, plus publications generated by CATIE since 1974.
IICA is Google’s first partner in Latin America to digitize its entire archive, one of the largest in the region. The Web company and the specialized agency of the inter-American system took the first step in 2006, when they incorporated the databases of the Agricultural Information Service of the Americas (SIDALC) into Google’s search engine.
Requests for information about agriculture on the www.sidalc.net website increased immediately. “We went from 3000 hits per month to 20,000-40,000 visitors per day,” IICA’s Head of Documentation and Publications, Federico Sancho, said.
Google’s Manager for Strategic Partners, Mark Nelson, explained that “incorporating books into our index allows us to offer our users more relevant information through their searches. Working with partners like IICA has enabled us to advance toward our main objective, which is to organize the world’s information so that it is universally accessible and useful.”
CATIE’s director of graduate studies, Glen Galloway, says that it is a “source of pride” for the Orton Commemorative Library to join forces with a company like Google.
“We greatly appreciate the opportunity to share our institution’s technical and scientific knowledge with a global audience. We expect this partnership to generate new contacts and fruitful relationships with representatives of other organizations that work in areas related to agriculture and the environment. This initiative is yet another example of the valuable collaboration between IICA and CATIE to promote sustainable development in the hemisphere,” Galloway remarked.
The two organizations view agriculture, rural life and the management and conservation of the natural resources of the Americas as forming part of a global context characterized by globalization and trade liberalization processes that have created opportunities and thrown up challenges for all the actors involved.
For that reason, they believe it is essential - given the crisis in food prices, the global financial crisis and the uncertainty created by climate change - to spread knowledge by means of dissemination processes such as the one made possible by this partnership.
“If all institutions that generate quality information do everything they can to organize their collections and make them available free of charge on the Net, the world will have an unimaginable amount of knowledge. That would mark the difference between those who view information as power and those of us who believe that sharing information is power,” Sancho concluded.
For more information, contact
federico.sancho@iica.int