1. Introduction
Almost all food scientists throughout the world use, or at least are aware of, the database called FSTA (or Food Science and Technology Abstracts). Yet comparatively few people have ever heard of IFIS (the International Food Information Service) which is the organisation that launched FSTA in 1969 and has been responsible for its compilation and publication ever since. And even if they have heard of it, they are unclear as to whether it is a German organisation or a British one, who governs it or where it gets its money from.
2. Aims and objectives
IFIS has always had two distinct arms (IFIS GmbH in Germany and IFIS Publishing in the UK) and, with the passage of time, these have evolved in different directions. Now, each has a completely different function and accompanying mission statement, as follows:
IFIS GmbH is a not-for-profit organisation commissioning basic and applied research and providing education and training programmes in information science for the international food science, food technology and human nutrition community.
IFIS Publishing is a not-for-profit organisation providing user-driven, financially sustainable, quality information products and services to the international food science, food technology and human nutrition community.
As a result, FSTA, which in the past has been seen as a joint activity of both arms of IFIS, has become the responsibility solely of IFIS Publishing, while the more altruistic activities such as education and research are the remit of IFIS GmbH. There is a further organisational difference in that IFIS GmbH has only one employee (the Managing Director, seconded from the Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft in Frankfurt) who will contract out most of the educational programmes and research projects to third parties, while IFIS Publishing has a full complement of staff to carry out its functions (editorial, IT, marketing and product development). As will be seen below, IFIS Publishing and IFIS GmbH come together to work on certain development projects.
3. Governance
Four diverse organisations (an intergovernmental organisation, a professional association, and the documentation departments of two government ministries) were responsible for the establishment of IFIS, and they contributed in cash and in kind, each according to its ability and expertise. Thus the German Institut fur Dokumentationswesen (with the Zentralstelle fur Machinische Dokumentation) designed the electronic processing systems, the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux (CAB) provided the editorial input, while the Institute of Food Technologists (USA), PUDOC (Netherlands) and CAB made available their commercial contacts. From the beginning these four organisations (except that ZADI (Zentralstelle fur Agrardokumentation und -information) later took the place of the IDW) each nominated two persons to the Board of Governors, and now this is their only role. The chairmanship rotates annually, and in 1996-97 the position is held by Drs Jacques Schippers, Director of PUDOC.
4. Finance
Both arms of IFIS are formally recognised as not for profit. Nevertheless, to remain viable IFIS Publishing has to meet all expenses out of sales income; therefore, it is run as a business, the only difference from a truly commercial organisation being that all surpluses are ploughed back into the organisation instead of going to the shareholders or owners. IFIS GmbH, on the other hand, is dependent for the time being on the assets accumulated in past years, but will in the future have some income from new services developed jointly with IFIS Publishing, and will be looking for external support for some of its educational and development activities.
5. What's new?
For IFIS Publishing the production of FSTA in various media will continue to be the main activity for the forseeable future, the aim being to make the database available in whatever way the users demand. There has been a dramatic change in usage over the years: print sales reached their peak in 1980, online in 1989-90, while CD-ROM sales have increased year on year since the launch at the end of 1990. The next change will be the impact of the Web: with effect from 1st June 1997, the last 12 months of input to FSTA has been accessible on the Internet at http://www.fsa.ifis.org. The most exciting things about this development are (1) it will be the most up-to-date version of the database, and (2) the low price, $500 per year for a single user password, or just $200 per year if searching is restricted to one of the groups of food commodities.
IFIS GmbH is looking even further ahead by organising a conference entitled 'Internet access to global food information for industry, academia, government and consumers - promises or solutions?'. This will take place in Frankfurt on 29-30th September 1997.
The keynote speech (Implications of the Information Society in a global context) will be given by David Worlock (UK), and he will be followed by a panel (from General Mills, USA, the US Food and Drug Administration, Cornell University, and the Organisation for Consumer Services, Germany) looking at the information needs of the user groups they represent. The first day ends with a presentation by Engineering Information Inc. on their Web-based Information Village - as its name implies, a sort of information supermarket in the sky. The second day begins with an overview by IFIS of the huge range of information sources available on the Internet. Then follow detailed presentations on a variety of services including FAO's WAICENT (World Agricultural Information Centre), the National Agricultural Library's AgNIC and FoodNIC, the commercial offerings of the secondary database services, and the place of electronic primary journals and document delivery. The conference is complemented by a small exhibition and a cybercafe where participants can surf the Net and discuss the pros and cons of different information sources.
IFIS will be making a special contribution to the conference in that it will be demonstrating a prototype indexed database of Internet resources on food science, technology and human nutrition. This will be a collaborative project in which the UK Institute of Food Research and the University of Giessen's Nutrition Information Center will be joining the two arms of IFIS. In a recent interview Bill Gates said 'The one thing about the Web is that you're almost guaranteed to get lost. Either you can't find anything or the search engines give you too much to sift through.' This project is aimed at solving that problem for anyone needing information on food.