Sixty-two years, more or less

There's a question I've been sitting with since I started this series. If IAALD mattered enough for me to still be quoting its mailing list eighteen years later, what happened to the profession it represented?

The short answer is that the organization shut down. The longer answer is more interesting, and it took me a while to piece together because nobody wrote a proper obituary.

Sixty-two years, more or less

IAALD was founded in Ghent, Belgium, on 9 September 1955. Sixty delegates from thirteen countries showed up. It succeeded an earlier body, the International Committee of Agricultural Librarians, which had been going since 1935, so the lineage runs back further than most people realize. The founding name was the International Association of Agricultural Librarians and Documentalists, which tells you what the job looked like at the time. The renaming to "Information Specialists" came later, when the work shifted from cataloguing books to managing data[reference:0].

For most of its existence IAALD did the things a professional association is supposed to do. It published a quarterly bulletin in four languages. It ran a World Congress every five years and regional conferences in between. It produced reference works that people actually used, including a 1990 world directory of agricultural information resource centres that catalogued 3,971 institutions across sixty countries[reference:1]. It also published IAALD News, which is where the three items I found in my drafts folder originally came from.

By the early 2010s the association described itself as "a leading global community of practice for information specialists serving agriculture," connecting professionals from more than seventy-five countries[reference:2]. In 2012 it launched a new website built on AgriDrupal, which at the time was a fairly ambitious move for a membership organization of that size[reference:3].

Then it stopped.

What happened, as far as I can tell

The UIA Yearbook, which tracks international organizations, lists IAALD as having ceased to exist in 2017[reference:4]. I have not found a public announcement explaining why, and I suspect there wasn't one. Associations like this rarely go out with a statement. They wind down gradually: membership renewals drop, the bulletin publishes less often, conference attendance thins, and at some point someone has to decide whether to keep filing the paperwork.

I don't want to speculate too hard about the causes, but I think a few things were working against it. The professional identity it was built around, the agricultural librarian and documentalist, was being absorbed into a broader and messier category called "information management." The people doing that work increasingly sat inside IT departments or data units, not libraries, and the case for a standalone professional body got harder to make. Meanwhile FAO, CGIAR and the regional research forums were building their own knowledge management capacity, which meant the association's convening function was being duplicated by better-funded institutions.

None of that makes the closure a failure. Sixty-two years is a long run for any professional body, and IAALD did the work that made the next phase possible.

Where the community actually went

Here's what surprised me. The function IAALD served didn't disappear. It got redistributed, and in some ways the redistribution produced better outcomes than the original model.

The clearest successor is the Agricultural Information Management Standards portal, known as AIMS. FAO runs it, and it describes itself as a community of more than 5,500 experts in agricultural information and data management from around the world. It provides an open space for exchanging ideas and solutions around information standards, data access services and open data[reference:5]. If you strip away the branding, that's roughly what IAALD's membership network was, except AIMS is free, digital, and attached to an institution with the resources to keep it running.

There is also a distinctly African successor, and I think this one is more significant than it gets credit for. The KM4AgD Community of Practice, convened by FARA under the CAADP-XP4 programme, runs a bi-monthly webinar series for knowledge management practitioners across the continent. Its 2026 programme opened with a session on linking knowledge management to monitoring, evaluation and learning, and a later session repositioned indigenous knowledge as a strategic asset for African agriculture[reference:6]. The community is explicitly continental rather than global, which is a meaningful shift. It means the conversations are happening closer to where the work is.

And of course the training layer is now FAO's KnowledgeLab, which I wrote about in the second piece in this series. The data provider courses on AGRIS and AGROVOC are, functionally, the professional development programme IAALD used to deliver through workshops and conference side events.

What got lost

I don't think the transition was cost-free, and it's worth being honest about that.

IAALD was independent. AIMS is a FAO portal. KM4AgD sits inside a programme funded by donors and coordinated by FARA. Both are doing good work, but neither is a membership organization accountable to its members. There is no longer a body that agricultural information professionals can join, pay dues to, vote in, and use to advocate for their own professional interests.

That matters more than it might sound. The people who do metadata work, maintain vocabularies, run institutional repositories and train others in data management are a small and geographically scattered group. The thing that kept them connected across seventy-five countries was a shared membership. Now the connection is mediated by platforms that individual practitioners don't own and can't govern.

Some of that is just how professional communities work now. But I'd like to see someone try to rebuild the membership piece, even in a lightweight form. A regional network for Southern African agricultural information specialists, for example, would not need a secretariat or a quarterly journal. It would need a mailing list, a couple of webinars a year, and someone willing to keep it going.

Where this series ends up

Three pieces ago I was looking at a 2008 mailing list post asking whether FAO deserved to be called a knowledge organization. What I didn't expect was that the answer would turn out to involve the disappearance of the organization that asked the question.

IAALD spent six decades insisting that agricultural information work was a profession, not an administrative task. That argument has largely been won. The work is now embedded in FAO's platforms, in continental knowledge management frameworks, and in university curricula. But the professional body that made the argument is gone, and I don't think anyone has replaced it with something that serves the same purpose.

So the question I'll leave hanging is this. If the work matters enough to build global infrastructure around, does it matter enough to have a professional home? I think it does. I just don't know who's going to build one.

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Last of three. The first looked at how FAO turned a scattered set of databases into working infrastructure. The second looked at what happens when a UN agency starts certifying university coursework in Africa. This one was about what gets left behind.

Sources: UIA Open Yearbook profile for IAALD; AIMS portal, FAO; IAALD: The First Fifty Years and "IAALD: Forty Years of Progress," both archived at Penn State and the University of Kentucky; IAALD AgInfo News archive, May 2008; FARA Africa coverage of the KM4AgD Community of Practice, January and June 2026; CTA Spore issue 30 (1990).

What's actually on the FAO Academy platform

The other day I was looking at the FAO elearning Academy site and noticed something odd. It claims nearly two million learners. I sat with that number for a while because I couldn't quite square it with the impression most people in agricultural research still carry around, which is that FAO training means a week in a hotel conference room with a folder of printed slides.

That is not what this is anymore. And I think that shift has gone largely unremarked outside a fairly small circle of people who watch capacity building closely.

What's actually on the platform

Free. Multilingual. Certified. Self-paced. Those four words are doing a lot of work, and each one matters more than it sounds.

Free removes the single biggest barrier to professional development in most African research institutions, which is that there is no budget line for it. Multilingual means it isn't just an English-language product with a translation layer bolted on. Certified means it produces something you can put on a CV or a LinkedIn profile, and FAO issues a verifiable digital badge for most courses on completion.[reference:0]

The course catalogue is broader than I expected. There are courses on the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, Codex Alimentarius, climate change and food security, agroforestry, biodiversity and agrifood systems, tick control in livestock, genebank data management.[reference:1] Somebody at FAO has been paying attention to what practitioners in the field actually need rather than what makes a good conference presentation.

The academy is organised into something like twenty-five thematic areas now, covering agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food security and nutrition.[reference:2] That breadth is both the strength and the weakness. The strength is obvious. The weakness is that without a curator, it's easy to get lost in there.

The university angle is the interesting part

Here is where it stops being just an online course library and starts being something more structural.

In June 2026, FAO and RUFORUM ran a webinar specifically about how universities can integrate FAO elearning resources into their academic programmes, covering forestry, food security, nutrition and agrifood systems transformation.[reference:3] The framing was explicit. This wasn't about promoting courses to students. It was about embedding FAO's learning products into degree curricula.

Makerere University is already doing it. The College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, working through the Department of Extension and Innovation Studies, held a seminar in January 2026 on integrating the FAO TAP AIS e-learning course into agricultural extension and innovation teaching at the university.[reference:4] The course itself runs six lessons on innovation and the FAO Science and Innovation Strategy, with case studies drawn from the TAPIIS project, and covers things like organisational capacity assessment, stakeholder engagement and monitoring and evaluation.[reference:5]

Participants get a certificate after an assessment, and if they don't pass first time they can retake it. That last detail tells you something about who the course is designed for. It's designed for people who are busy, who might rush through it at eleven at night, and who shouldn't be penalised for that.

Also in June, UNIMED co-organised a similar webinar on academic collaboration with the academy, and there have been equivalent sessions at Tashkent State Agrarian University and the University of Sulaimani.[reference:6] So this is not a one-off African pilot. It's a deliberate strategy of embedding FAO courseware into higher education institutions across multiple regions, and Africa happens to be a prominent piece of it.

The continental layer nobody talks about

In August 2026, at the ninth Africa Agriculture Science Week in Abuja, the African Union Commission, the CAADP-XP4 consortium and CGIAR signed a renewed Knowledge Management Partnership Framework covering 2026 to 2030.[reference:7]

The language in the announcement is worth reading carefully. The partners said the new phase repositions knowledge management as "a strategic driver of agricultural transformation, rather than a function limited to documentation and dissemination."[reference:8] That is a direct rebuke of how knowledge management has been treated in most agricultural institutions for the past twenty years, which is as an administrative afterthought staffed by whoever had time.

The framework commits to stronger digital and AI-enabled knowledge infrastructure, and, more interestingly, to "more deliberate integration of indigenous and local knowledge alongside formal science."[reference:9] That second commitment is the one I'd watch. It's easy to write into a framework and hard to deliver.

By 2030 the partners expect to see knowledge management institutionalised across African agricultural research institutions and a more accessible continental knowledge infrastructure.[reference:10] If that happens, the elearning Academy stops being a useful free resource and becomes part of the scaffolding of African agricultural education. That's a different level of significance.

Where I think the gap still is

Two million learners is a lot. But I'd want to know how many of them finish. Completion rates for self-paced online learning are notoriously low, and the courses that attract the most enrolments are not always the ones that produce the most competence.

I'd also want to know the geographic distribution. If the bulk of those learners are in Europe and North America, then the African universities currently integrating FAO courseware are the exception rather than the rule, and that matters for how we talk about this.

The bigger question is whether a digital badge from FAO carries weight in a hiring decision at a ministry of agriculture in Gaborone or Lilongwe. I genuinely don't know. It ought to. But credential recognition moves slower than credential issuance, and FAO can only control one of those two things.

What it adds up to

The 2008 question about FAO's capacity building work was whether it could scale beyond scattered workshops. The answer, twenty years later, is that it has scaled, but not in the way anyone predicted. It scaled by building a platform and then getting universities to plug their curricula into it.

Whether that produces better agricultural professionals than the old workshop model is an empirical question nobody has seriously tried to answer yet. I'd like to see someone try.

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Second of three. Next: what actually happened to IAALD, and where the agricultural information profession went when its main professional body shut down.

Sources: FAO elearning Academy; FAO-RUFORUM webinar materials, June 2026; Makerere University CAES, January 2026; UNIMED, June 2026; FARA coverage of the AUC/CAADP-XP4/CGIAR Knowledge Management Partnership Framework, August 2026.

FAO as a knowledge organization.

I was clearing out an old drafts folder last week and found something I'd saved back in 2008. A short item from the IAALD mailing list, headline almost funny in hindsight: "FAO as a knowledge organization."

Back then people genuinely argued about it. I remember sitting in a session where someone listed FAO's databases on a flipchart and asked, half seriously, whether four separate websites counted as a system. Nobody had a good answer. AGRIS was over here. AGORA was over there. AGROVOC was something most of us knew existed and few of us had actually used.

So the question went unresolved for years. What settled it wasn't a policy paper. It was plumbing.

AGRIS turned fifty in 2025. FAO marked it by renaming the thing (it's FAO AGRIS now) and, more interestingly, by talking about it as a public good instead of an institutional database. I don't think that's just branding. There's a real difference between a catalogue a big agency maintains and a piece of shared infrastructure that other people's systems depend on.

The parts finally started talking to each other

Here's what changed, as far as I can tell. In 2008 you had three or four platforms that each did one thing well and didn't share much underneath. Now they're wired together, and FAO's KnowledgeLab sits on top as the training layer. In March this year the KnowledgeLab moved to a newer Moodle setup and started running self-paced courses for people who submit data to AGROVOC, AGORA and AGRIS.

Worth being clear about what those courses actually are, because "e-learning" covers a lot of junk. They're short, structured, and they end with a certificate. The content is unglamorous: how to describe a record properly, how to use the vocabulary tools, how metadata standards work in practice. If you've ever tried to explain cataloguing rules to someone who didn't want to learn them, you'll understand why this is a bigger deal than it sounds.

FAO isn't just handing out access to information anymore. It's training the people who keep the information usable. That's a different job.

Why metadata is the boring bit that matters

AGRIS follows the FAIR principles, which you've probably seen on a hundred slides. Findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable. The reason it means something here is that it's a technical specification, not a slogan. Records get normalised as they come in, so a paper catalogued by a university library in Gaborone can show up in the same search results as something from a CGIAR centre in Colombia, described the same way, in more or less the same language.

It also holds a Digital Public Good designation now, which is basically an accountability mechanism. It commits the platform to open licensing and equitable access.

The normalisation work is the part nobody thanks anyone for. Twenty years ago every institution had its own way of describing a report, which is exactly why cross-country searching didn't work. Fixing that is not exciting. It's just necessary.

Then there's the AI conversation, which I'm less confident about

AI was all over Open Repositories 2026. Semantic search, automatic metadata generation, machine translation of records, AI-assisted discovery. Fine. But every session I've read notes from came back to the same uncomfortable questions about governance and bias, and the answers were mostly "we're working on it."

My worry is fairly specific. If the discovery layer gets trained mostly on English-language research from the global north, the multilingual work that AGROVOC was built to enable slowly stops mattering. Not because anyone decided that. Because the ranking algorithm quietly deprioritises it and nobody notices for five years. That's how these things usually go.

I don't have a solution. I'd just rather say it out loud than pretend the technology is neutral.

What this means if you're working in Southern Africa

Four things, from where I sit.

Visibility, first. Research from this region only becomes globally findable if it's deposited and described to interoperable standards. Joining AGRIS as a data provider isn't marketing. It's the difference between existing in search results and not.

Second, the training gap is solvable and nobody has an excuse. Those KnowledgeLab courses are free and self-paced. Most national research institutions in the region don't have a dedicated metadata specialist. That's a fixable problem and the fix is sitting there online.

Third, language. AGROVOC's multilingual structure is one of the few serious attempts to keep agricultural terms retrievable in something other than English. For anyone producing research in Setswana, Nyanja or Shona, that's not a nice-to-have.

And fourth, the policy angle. Continental frameworks increasingly treat knowledge management as part of how evidence gets scaled up. Institutions that aren't plugged into the infrastructure tend to disappear from those conversations. Not deliberately. They just stop getting cited.

Where I've landed

The 2008 question seems almost naive now. Nobody asks whether FAO is a knowledge organization anymore. The useful question is a different one, and I think it's harder: who gets left out when the infrastructure gets built?

FAO's answer so far is layered. AGRIS does discovery. AGROVOC handles meaning across languages. KnowledgeLab trains people. The Digital Public Good status is meant to keep them honest. Whether that holds up for the researchers who need it most is an open question and I don't think we'll know for another five years.

What I do know is that the argument has moved on. It isn't whether these systems exist. It's whether the people who need them can actually reach them.

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First of three. Next up, the FAO elearning Academy and what happens when a UN agency starts certifying university coursework in Africa.

Sources: FAO AGRIS, AGROVOC, AGORA and FAO elearning Academy websites; Digital Public Goods Alliance; Open Repositories 2026 programme; IAALD AgInfo News archive, May 2008.