AGRIS  is a cooperative system in which participating countries input references to the literature produced within their boundaries and, in return, draw on the information provided by the other participants.  161 national and 31 international/intergovernmental centres participate and submit about 14.000 items per month.

The system  collects bibliographic references (to date, about 3 million)  to either conventional (journal articles, books) or non-conventional materials  (sometimes called "grey literature" e.g. theses, reports, etc.,) not available through normal commercial channels.

One of the main reasons for AGRIS' existence is to encourage the exchange of information among developing countries, whose literature would not be covered by other international systems.
                                 During the 4th Technical Consultation , held at FAO in June 1998, the representatives endorsed FAO's general proposal to re-focus the role of AGRIS, concentrating on the dissemination of a wider range of agricultural information to a broader audience.

Member countries have specifically asked FAO to give priority to national capacity building. The end result will be the development and strengthening of  national agricultural information management programmes using Internet-based technologies. Instead of sending bibliographic references to FAO,  participants to the envisaged new system  will make their references, data  and full-text information accessible on the Web, and  access  increasingly diverse information themselves.

The AGRIS database is now on line at this site, as well as AGROVOC, the Multilingual Agricultural Thesaurus, which is directly accessible at http://www.fao.org/agrovoc  

Coming under  WAICENT's "umbrella mechanism" will bring numerous advantages to participating countries such as: access to full text in electronic format; participant control of scope, coverage, description and distribution of local information; faster access to information following elimination of centralized conversion and processing; and greater exposure of national information and access to world agricultural data via the  WAICENT server.

FAO's role will be to assist countries in reaching the goal of self-sufficiency in information management. The Organization will:

   continue to develop tools and methodologies, through WAICENT, which can be used at national, regional and international levels, as part of the global information exchange process;

   sensitize decision-makers to the importance of investing information systems;

   and establish training courses both at FAO and in developing countries.

© FAO, Rome.  Updated: April 1999