Introduction

The Flanders Marine Institute - Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee (VLIZ) is happy to organize the 2006 ASFA Advisory Board Meeting in the premises of the IOC Project Office for IODE, Oostende from 4-8 September 2006. VLIZ is the National ASFA Partner for Belgium in the ASFA system since 2002. The Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts (ASFA) is an International Cooperative Information System which comprises an abstracting and indexing service covering the world's literature on the science, technology, management, and conservation of marine, brackish water, and freshwater resources and environments, including their socio-economic and legal aspects. The ASFA bibliographic database is the principal output of the system and it contains approximately 1,000,000 references, with coverage since 1971.

Flanders Marine Institute and IOC Project Office for IODE

The system is managed by a partnership of one publishing partner (CSA), several UN co-sponsoring partners, international partners, and national partners. An up-to-date list of all partners can be consulted here: http://www.fao.org/fi/asfa/partners.asp.

The overall objective of the ASFA Partnership is to disseminate information on aquatic sciences and fisheries to the world community, bearing in mind the special interests of developing countries in this field. The ASFA-partners do this by producing bibliographic references to the literature published within their geographic or subject area, or within their country, including their own publications. The publishing partner CSA produces the ASFA information products and services, which CSA then distributes back to the ASFA Partners for use in their respective information systems. CSA also makes the ASFA products available commercially to the public in various formats. One of these formats is the web-based access to the ASFA-database (http://www.csa.com/factsheets/aquclust-set-c.php).

All ASFA Partners are represented on the ASFA Advisory Board, which meets once a year and produces annual ASFA Advisory Board Meeting Reports. FAO, in addition to the preparation of ASFA input, provides the ASFA Secretariat.