International NGO promoting international cooperation, research, negotiation, trade in coffee. Administers International Coffeee Agreement.
Information services include:
(a) WWW site with selected information on the organisation.
(b) WWW site has brief samples of types of statistics that ICO can supply and overviews of coffee country profiles, full-texts of which are both available on subscription.
(c) Coffeeline: bibliographical database containing material identified and processed by the Organisation from the beginning of 1973. Studies or articles on coffee or relevant to coffee are identified from a range of some 5,000 journals. The database also includes details of books, reports, theses, audiovisual materials and other textual records. Each reference consists of bibliographical details (author, page numbers etc.) and most of those added since 1980 have abstracts which summarise the information contained in the original. The scope of the database is completely international; titles are given in the original language and in English, abstracts in English. aims to cover the whole field of information on coffee, and at November 1996 contained over 35,000 records. Not available online yet. The Library Monthly Entries Bulletin is a monthly listing of items added to the database.
(d) Library: a unique international reference collection built up over 30 years of some 12,000 monographs (books, reports, theses, pamphlets) and 250 periodical titles covering all aspects of coffee. In addition to printed material the Library holds a major collection of colour slides and videotapes. Short enquiries on any aspect of coffee will where possible be answered by telephone. More detailed enquiries, including requests for ICO statistics, should be submitted in writing and addressed to the Executive Director. Charges may be payable for documents and research.
(e) iCoffee: commercial news and statistics service (see separate entry)