<back>

Orgprints Workshop, 28 March 2006
Report and full user manual

For the full Orgprints User Guide, click here
(pdf format document, 706kb)

This workshop was held as part of the Defra funded PACARes project, which aims to disseminate the results of Defra funded organic farming research to farmers, advisors and others and to promote the use of the Organic-Eprints web archive as a resource for storage and access to organic research information. The workshop took place near Coventry on March 28th 2006.

The purpose was to inform and familiarise a group of key organic sector workers with the structure, content, and use of the archive and to elicit their views on which subject areas might be worthy of reviewing in a series of forthcoming reports.

The workshop was attended by 17 participants from a range of different backgrounds, ranging from research over advisory work to industry. Participants were asked to introduce themselves and to state their interest in attending the workshop. Familiarity with the archive varied, some participants were mainly interested in using it as an information source, others would like to use it to store and disseminate research materials produced in their own organisations.

Susanne Padel gave a presentation on the history, background, purposes and structure of the archive. The discussion mainly covered copyright issues in relation to archived material, which was discussed in some depth and it was agreed to approach some of the journals of high importance to UK organic farming researchers where the publishers attitude to self-archiving is not clear, such as BAH.

Mark Measures then gave a short introduction to the background and tasks involved in the PACARes project. He explained some of the topics under consideration for a planned series of dissemination oriented research reviews and asked for comments and suggestions. This produced a lively discussion and a number of useful ideas, such as poultry feeding and health status and pointed out that for some of the topics some relevant dissemination material already exists, for example as a result of the ADAS soil fertility project. New topics suggested included scab control in sheep, the use of minimum tillage in organic systems and the derogation for using synthetic vitamins in animal diets.

Steve Lowman gave an overview of the Defra-funded research so far uploaded into archive. Then the workshop was adjourned for lunch. During the afternoon, the participants had the opportunity to register with the OrgPrints archive, search the archive and go through one example of uploading a research document, using a handout prepared for the workshop as a simple User guide to ORGPRINTS. Help was available from the organisers; any important issues or questions were discussed by the whole group, and demonstrations of searching procedures were given as necessary.

Feedback received during the day and in the final session indicated that the participants considered the day as very useful and this will hopefully lead to those organisations represented becoming more involved in using and contributing to the archive both for dissemination and for documentation of UK organic farming research