FARA at ZAR4DIN, 23-27 August 2010

The ZAR4DIN Session started smoothly and gained speed with several sessions on various web 2, development and management of e-repositories, the eRAILS portal, etc.

Participants were very enthusiastic.

It is to be noted that Zambia is the first country from the SADC sub-region to have a training on the eRAILS portal. This is a great move and an opportunity as FARA and its member SROs are working on setting a pool of specialists on capacity building on the eRAILS, the African Portal on Agriculture.

The challenge now is to keep the momentum and go a step further by ensuring the presence of each organization on the portal.

Management of e-Documents and Remote Collaboration Workshop

The Zambia Agricultural Research for Development Information Network (ZAR4DIN), a FAO and FARA supported initiative whose main goal is to develop a national network of institutions and individuals involved in agricultural research for development (AR4D) information/knowledge generation, management, dissemination and exchange, and learning in order to facilitate access to AR4D information and knowledge, including metadata and full-text documents, through interlinked institutional repositories linked to a national AR4D portal, held a training workshop on Management of e-Documents and Remote Collaboration for 15 participants from the following institutions:

• Zambia Agricultural Research Institute


• National Institute for Scientific and Industrial


• National Agricultural Information Services


• University of Zambia – School of Agriculture/School of Veterinary Medicine


• Livestock Development Trust

The workshop was held in the quite premises of the Palmwood Lodge in Chudleigh, Lusaka from 23 to 27 August 2010.


The workshop, among others, covered:

• Digital Information Technologies and Information Production and Distribution


• Types of Electronic Documents and their Advantages/Limitations


• Workflows for Creating, Processing and Delivering Documents on Different Media


• Introduction to Metadata


• Digitization of Documents


• Building Institutional Repositories – Issues and Tools


• Web 2.0 for collaboration - Blogging using Blogger, Remote Collaboration using Google Docs and Social Bookmarking using Delicious


• e-RAILS

Key outputs of the workshop include:

• ZAR4DIN Blog – to be used for raising awareness on ZAR4DIN, sharing knowledge on agricultural research for development in Zambia, and reporting on ARD activities in Zambia.
• e-RAILS Zambia Pages
• Agreement to finalize the MoU for ZAR4DIN
• Agreement to develop institutional repositories of metadata and full-text documents using OAI-PMH compliant tools.