 This is the session that is about agris, next, Ikei, but before I move and I explain what agris is in a nutshell, I would like simply to introduce the organization that is in charge of agris. This is the Food and Agriculture Organization of United Nations, FAO, this is a specialized agency that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Our goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high quality food to lead active and healthy lives. Cheating Zero Hunger is at the heart of FAO and is so also the contribution of agris to this challenge. So, as the theme of this conference suggests to the feed hunger, knowledge is key and sharing is vital. This is something not new in the context of FAO. This compromise has been there for many years and FAO has set up series of knowledge programs to facilitate this. And the idea is to make information produced in FAO member countries easily to access and usually to reuse worldwide. We want to facilitate what it would be, the knowledge sharing, the information sharing among the countries is the production of in agricultural science is huge and it's sometimes produced locally or could be nationally, but also languages that are not necessarily English, how we can as FAO to facilitate this through knowledge programs and through knowledge platforms that help to make this possible. And the objective of all is simply what I was saying before to support the sustainable development goals through the end of hunger, which is one of the objectives of the SDGs. Next. So, if we would be in a room and this would be a face-to-face workshop, I would say how many of you have heard about IRIS before, but since the chat is limited and also you are getting a number of people that are attending right now is getting high, I would say that IRIS is the international information system for agricultural sciences and technology became operational in 1975 and essentially in a nutshell what IRIS does is to collect bibliographic information from around the world on scientific, technical and socioeconomic publications on a wide variety of topics related to food and agriculture or as I will show you later, any found areas of interest. Essentially, we compile the information in a rational and a systematic way in a standardized way and we publish this in a database every single month. IRIS is published and released monthly. Next. Why is so important to mention this slide here today? Agricultural sciences are applied sciences and they have some, let's say, elements that make agricultural sciences a little bit different than other sciences. For instance, there is a lot of research that is being done by private companies and public organizations together in the sense that both of them are really publishing quite a lot of research. There are a lot of interests as well from the private sector to learn. There is a lot of research that is not peer-reviewed and is what's in the information world we call gray literature as Ilkay will show later. Essentially, it includes thesis reports, includes conference papers, particularly let's keep in mind the reports research in a specific country can produce a report and then this is being shared in another organization. And then there is also the multilingual aspect. Agricultural sciences don't necessarily speak English only. The multilingual aspect is very important. Next. Essentially, the functions of IRIS, can you go back? Oh, sorry, no, OK. IRIS is composed of two elements. I will simply mention this very briefly because we are going to go through that later on. Is the IRIS network, which is a community of organizations who collect and contribute with information about food and agricultural literature and participate as well in knowledge and activities. And there is also the database that, as I mentioned before, now is 13.5 million structured demographic records on agricultural science and technology in 90 languages. Both of them have different URLs. Take note of these URLs. You might want to look at them to go and to double check them after the conference next. Well, the functions of IRIS essentially that we could summarize in three. First is to produce this database and mention this is our goal. Is this what is populating the knowledge platform I mentioned before? But the knowledge platform also needs to have very modern and mechanisms for retrieval that can help the end user find the information that they are looking for in the database. But this is not only that. We also have to interact with certain genes with those that can increase this search on the web. So to give a more accessibility to what is being produced in a small library, in a small place, in a specific country, despite of the language that the documents were written. Next. This is the scope of IRIS. So essentially it reflects the scope of FAO. There are quite a lot of subject groups in very high levels, subject groups in FAO, specifically fisheries, forestry, animal production and health, land and water, agriculture, economics. Now, for instance, everybody talks a lot about agricultural innovation, etc. Next. And who is using? So what would be potentially the users of IRIS in case that and your users in case if you disliked this debate? Well, it's very, very, let's say it's not small. I mean, we have students, we have scientists, librarians, researchers, publishers, policymakers, among others. And what is what they are looking for essentially? They want to find relevant information on their field of expertise without noise. They want to, they want to get better retrieval. They want to get things that are really pertinent to what they are looking for. They also want to access to information, but it's also published in other languages rather than English. And besides that, they want to access full text. There might be also interested in understanding what has been produced graphically speaking about something during a long period of time in a specific country despite there is full text or not accessible. Next. This is the IRIS network today in 2021. These colors reflect the number of data providers that we have by country. Russian Federation is by the most the country that has more data providers. But yes, as you can see, we have still some gaps, wide gaps, and that we would like really that if we have people in the audience that come from these countries, that they decide to participate in the IRIS network and benefit of all what we are going to explain today. We have about 447 data providers and we have 53 pending applications today. It's important to remind you that this is almost 50 years of changing information in the context of IRIS. So some organizations have simply are not there anymore. They have been dismissed or they simply changed the name and they became something else or they merged with another organization. So there are different elements that make that actually the active data providers can be a little bit less than that. Simply because we have data providers that we're providing data in the 70s that they are not there anymore. Next. Yes, I guess this is very much used, I would say. And actually this slide shows you that, for instance, in the period of six months from January to June this year and the same period last year, we received an increase of some thousands of new users and also a relevant increase of sessions. It's quite used and this is also thank you to what I was saying before about the fact that we are collaborating with search engines which are definitely contributing very much to facilitate this discovery on the web about IRIS content next. And just this is my last slide before we get and we invite our guest speakers and we open the questions and answers today for this first session. We have been working very hard to get as much content as possible in IRIS, particularly since 2017. This is, we get more or less about approximately one half a million between half a million and a million new records every year, depending a little bit about what the data providers are submitting. However, since this year we have developed a tool that is helping us to automatize the retrieval from external repositories. Therefore, we can do things more automatically and this makes your life and our life much easier and this is the reason why, for instance, and recently we have in six months increased 1.5 million, the number of bibliographic records that are now available in IRIS. Said that I hope that this was next. I hope that this was useful. I hope that this just warms up a little bit this first session in our conference. There's a lot of other things I could explain in this first session. Lots, but I try to be very concise and very specific since we will have also time to talk together later on if you are interested. Said that I'm very pleased to say that these two persons, Justin Kisenga and Anadiko Wanayuti, agreed to be here today. They are both very busy people. All the IRIS team is very happy of this. Just for introducing a little bit, Justin. Justin is the capacity development officer and team leader of the partnerships with academia and research institutions in the partnerships units of the partnerships and UN collaboration division at FAO. And I would simply say as well that Justin was there and already working in IRIS much earlier than when I took the IRIS program. So I'm very glad that he is here today. And there is also Enrico Wanayuti. He is the team leader at monitoring, evaluation and learning at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the dry areas in Carva. He is also the program management officer at the CGIR research program on roots, tubers and bananas, led by the International Potato Center. To both of them, I would like if you then can turn on the webcams and also the mics. And I would simply say that you could start with Justin Kisenga. If you would like to start with your thoughts about IRIS and your experiences with IRIS, it seems quite a lot of time, I would say. Thank you, Justin. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much, Ima. Thank you, colleagues, from wherever you are for participating in this, in my view, very important conference on IRIS. I'd like to start, let me ask you two questions, which I don't want you to answer, but I want you to reflect on how many times have you or your institutions participated in agricultural information management and data sharing initiatives or networks or programs and maybe only to see them end almost abruptly and leaving you stranded. Some of you, or all of you, are you looking for a long-term and sustainable solution with a global public domain platform or not a network through which you can provide continuous access to your institution's agricultural sciences and technology, data or information, and at the same time, participate in the data knowledge sharing activities. I'm sure if you give it a thought, these two questions will resonate well with most of you and more so maybe with colleagues from developing countries. Now, why do I begin with these two questions? The reason is because I want to emphasize one aspect of IRIS that many of us have never thought about and this came in as the result of my experience working on the IRIS activities and other initiatives in Africa. IRIS saves both developed and developing countries and in my view, IRIS can address the challenge I posed in the first question of participating initiatives that all of a sudden disappears and also the second question which he alluded to long-term sustainability of the initiative. As Ima indicated, IRIS was operationalized in 1975, but of course the activities and work to set up IRIS started way before 1975 and you will take note that since then, if we take either 74, which is the year in which most of the activities and the when the number of institutions were expressing interest to participate in IRIS to today, we'll be talking about almost 47 years in operation, which is not long. It's still very young. Some of us are older than 47 years, but believe you me, in this period, there are so many international initiatives that emerged and they have disappeared. Now, IRIS's long-term life, in my view, is due to several factors and these include, of course, commitment and investment by the key IRIS stakeholders, which among others and Ima alluded to this, of course, the governments, the institutions which are acting as IRIS and the data providers and also FAO's commitment and support to IRIS, which has included a lot of things, including the development of the documentation, the manuals, standards and the tools to facilitate agricultural information management. And another factor is the fact that IRIS is a public good. It's a good to which governments have asked their institutions to contribute to for the benefit of everybody. And another factor is that IRIS has been able to adapt. IRIS started in the years of mainframe computers. In the years when most of you were participating in IRIS, we are using forms to complete your inputs. But nowadays, you agree with me that you have gone digital and IRIS has gone digital. So, IRIS is a step I aimed and that all these factors have helped IRIS to stay this far. And believe you me, they will also help IRIS to stay and be there for another more years to come. And a very good example of the commitment some governments and institutions have made, I think I can cite one example. The government of India in 1974, when the negotiations were going on and the idea to set up IRIS was agreed upon, the government committed itself to be working at least in and participating in IRIS for a national input center, which was to be based at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. Today, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research is still participating in IRIS and contributing to the IRIS open data set. So you can imagine from almost the very beginning, the institution, the government, they have been committed to that. So with that commitment, IRIS has a long, long, long, long life. And if you, if we invest in IRIS, at least we are guaranteed that even our, if you may allow me, even our grandchildren and their children who have interests in agricultural information and knowledge management, who will be working in this field, they will also be using IRIS. And there are other institutions, and these who agree with me, especially more from developing countries, that have also benefited in a way from being associated with IRIS. IMA didn't indicate that the number of data providers could be low in the sense that the way others in the past could have been very active and along the way, due to various reasons, they may have fallen by the wayside. And this is the case for most institutions, especially in developing countries. But the benefits are still there. And we can talk about. I'll give you a few examples, more of the names of the institution that I personally know benefited in a way. And these are institutions who had started contributing to IRIS at the time when they may not even have had computers. They were using the input forms. But later on, when they started using digital technologies and they wanted to set up their own internal local databases, some of them moved and went to IRIS to get the records and the popularity of their local databases. And here we can think of institutions like the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization, of course in Kenya, Institutes for Scientific and Technology Co-Information, INSTI, which belongs to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Ghana, Ethiopia Institute for Agricultural Research, National Agricultural Research Organization in Uganda. These are institutions that were active participants in IRIS. And one advantage they also benefited was the fact that even at the time when they had no access to the internet, they were not using digital technology that much, their literature could be seen by anyone around the globe. Their literature could be requested by anyone around the globe. And of course, there could have been challenges in the sense that area on IRIS was not providing access to full text documents, but there was a mechanism in place supported by the network to ensure that if a request comes, the documents or the request could be honoured. I think these are the major points that I wanted to illustrate. The sustainability or the long-term assured the sustainability of IRIS, which means that the investment that we are going to make, you and me, as institutions by participating in IRIS, they are going to be very, very, very long lasting. That is one. The second one is also the fact that, and especially for institutions in developing countries, IRIS can save as a backup for our infrastructure. I'm being practical. I'm being practical not to beat about the bush. In some places we have infrastructure that is not reliable. If we were in a position where we lost all our records, all our data, all our bibliography records, and they associated the full text if we are providing any and we want to rebuild, chances are that IRIS will be there for us and we can go back and re-arvest our contribution and start developing our local initiatives. I think these are the two important points I wanted to share with you colleagues. They are based on my experience of working with colleagues in the ministries of agriculture, their agricultural research institutions, and universities in Africa. And in conclusion, my view is that IRIS is a huge opportunity for a large number of institutions in developing countries. Thank you, Ima. Thank you, Justin. Thank you so much. I just would like to remind everybody that if you need interpretation, remember, there is an icon here in the bottom. There is a world and that you can click on and you can select a language that is not English in case that you need some help. Justin, this was a very good addition to what I was saying before. Actually, you went even beyond with your long experience with Agde, so I really appreciate it very much. Now I would like to bring in Enrico Buonayuti. I hope that you can see him now. I hope that people can confirm because we had a little bit of a problem before with the screens. Yes, Enrico, over to you. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you, Ima, for this and really thanks Justin for his insights because I come from one institution, from my data provider, Ikada of Agris, and I feel very in line with this. As one of the world's oldest bibliographic databases for agricultural science and technology, Agris really represents a gold standard in all its sharing for agricultural research institution and organization worldwide. Ikada has long benefited from the expertise of knowledge of Agris. This productive partnership began at Ikada founding. Since then, Agris has appeared in countless reports and papers published by Ikada. An important collaboration has been forged with national research organizations. With today's rapid digitalization of research for development, the collaboration with Agris is further strengthened in partnership with the monitoring evaluation and learning team, MEL, which leads Ikada efforts to share agricultural knowledge and reach in North Africa, Western Central Asia, and beyond. As an integral component of CGR, the world's largest agricultural innovation network within which Ikada sits, MEL contributes to better target poverty to enhance the uptake and maximize impact of the agricultural research outputs. It does so by improving the quality and effectiveness of knowledge management and agricultural data exchange. Alongside many other scientific research organizations dedicated to the same mission of open access knowledge sharing, Agris and MEL create more opportunities towards the sentiment of this meeting, which is knowledge is key and sharing is vital to defeat hunger. Working with and learning from Agris has helped MEL to increase agricultural knowledge, findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability in line with the fair principle. In particular, Agris long-term determination to promote equitable and free access to scientific knowledge and data is inspiring and something we must all emulate. A vital function of a platform like Agris, maintained globally by FEO, is that many national research organizations can still quickly and easily receive support to manage their research finding and store their metadata, even if they do not operate their own institutional repository. Further, Agris is suitable for several types of knowledge such as academic papers, gray literature, and dataset, and more offering a high flexibility. For MEL, the Agris platform was crucial to support content in different languages, enabling us to expand knowledge sharing across countries, improve visibility and access to sciences, and the technical content of agricultural research. Over time, we have seen organizations and institutions dissolved or discontinued, and Agris has always been there to preserve the knowledge, heritage, and legacy, to make sure information remained accessible. In the case of Icarda, who relocated abruptly from Syria in 2012, Agris guided us through quickly, creating digital records of our publication metadata. We now use Agris to search for our historical publication, find digital version, and make it available in our own institutional repository. As an internationally recognized information system supported by FEO, Agris has the prestige and the audience to highlights and champion our research, reaching more people, exploring knowledge on food and agriculture, and make it a good investment for knowledge management rather than creation of parallel efforts. Agris is a key innovation to be embedded in national action and aid intervention proposal for better exchange of knowledge, information and data on food and agriculture. To conclude, I strongly believe in the continuous mutual commitment of both Agris and Icarda towards open access knowledge management. To enhance scientific knowledge, generate more impact, and play an important role in the achievement of UN Nation Sustainable Development Goals. Thank you. Thank you, Ima.