ICADLA 4: International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives

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4th International Conference On African Digital Libraries & Archives(ICADLA-4), GHANA

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The biodiversity heritage library and African digital libraries in the global context.
(Smithsonian Institution Washington, DC, United States, 2015-05-29) Kalfatovic, Martin R.; Fourie, Anne-Lise
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) was created in 2006 as a direct response to the needs of the taxonomic community for access to early literature. Designed with meeting these needs, the BHL was grant-funded and quickly proved its value to its target users. The original BHL organizational model, based on US and UK partners, provided a template for, first, BHL Europe, and then a series of global nodes, most recently, BHL Africa and BHL Singapore. As the BHL moved from project to a cornerstone of biodiversity infrastructure, sustainability, appropriate expansion, collaboration with national and pan-national digital libraries (Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America) became more important. Working within the unique and often challenging environments of Sub-Saharan Africa, BHL assisted in the creation of BHL Africa is an inclusive network of African libraries and institutions in Western, Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. The short term goals of BHL/BHL Africa are surveying the biodiversity content of Sub-Saharan partners, defining digitization and aggregation capacity, and delivering African content to the BHL portal. This presentation will cover principles of pan-institutional digital library development, working across multiple African institutions, address areas of growth, and formulate lessons learned through global BHL growth.
Content to consider: Exploring gender bias in colonial collections
(King's College London, 2015-05-29) Gibson, Laura Kate
[still need] “Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense” (Nietzsche, 46) Digitisation of cultural heritage collections in and by libraries, archives and museums is never a neutral process. The decisions we make today about what to digitise from our collections are inextricably influenced by past decisions made about which items should even be included in our collections. These selection processes reflect and perpetuate the worldviews of those people making these decisions as well, as power balances, or imbalances, prevalent at that time. In much of Africa, and elsewhere, European colonialism exerted a profound influence over collecting institutions and continues to affect how they operate today. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the selection process and decisions made by institutions were not inevitable and that, very often, collections are imbued with various biases. If we are to avoid replicating and reinforcing these normalised biases, we must first be aware of how and why value judgements were made. Using gender imbalance in collections as an example, I suggest that exposing and interrogating biases during the planning stage of a digitisation project can be a very rewarding process that not only reveals “gaps” in a collection, but creates spaces for other voices to be heard.
Digital library readiness in Africa: A strategic human resource perspective
(University of Education Winneba, Ghana, 2015-05-29) Owusu-Ansah, Christopher M.
The success of any digital library endeavour significantly depends on the human capital of the implementing organisation. Many African institutions and academic libraries in developing countries are focusing and channeling significant resources into planning and setting up digital libraries. However, the main hurdle for many of these efforts is the human resource capacity of staff expected to implement these projects as several studies show a considerable skills gap in many digital library projects leading to sustainability challenges. The aim of this paper is to propose the application of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in evaluating digital library resources and services in Ghana to determine the readiness of academic libraries in implementing sustainable digital library services. As a result, the study examines the strategic plan of a multi-campus public university in Ghana with a view to aligning it to the same university’s library digital strategy using the BSC. The study proposes to academic libraries involved in digital initiatives to be mindful of the digital, financial and societal contexts in which they operate. The study is expected to contribute to efforts at finding strategic measures to drive the vision of the digital library African institutions.
Digital preservation in the context of institutional repositories in public universities' libraries in Ghana.
(The Balme Library, University of Ghana, 2015-05-29) Mensah, Monica
Long-term preservation of digital collections is an integral task for institutional repositories. It ensures that the digital intellectual output of the library is preserved for future access. Digital preservation has been recognized as a complex process, and there are still many unsolved issues which makes it a challenging task for institutional repositories. As such, this paper is aimed at identifying and discussing the issues and challenges of digital preservation facing institutional repositories in public university libraries in Ghana. The study was qualitative. Data used for analysis were drawn from respondents from public universities who had developed institutional repositories to capture, maintain and disseminate their information in the digital form. The key finding of the study was that, although the universities had established institutional repositories to capture and maintain digital collections, existing digital preservation methods and systems were inadequate and could lead to consequences such as denial of access to their digital collections or total loss of information. Recommendations based on findings included the development of comprehensive digital preservation policies to provide mandate and direction to preservation of the libraries digital collections.
Digital Preservation: Handling Large Collections Case Study: Digitizing Egyptian Press Archive at Centre for Economic, Judicial, and Social Study and Documentation(CEDEJ)
(Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt, 2015-09-14) Samir, Ahmed; Sharkas, Ahmed; Adly, Noha; Nagi, Magdy
Managing the digitization of large collections is quite a challenge not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of text and material quality, designing the workflow system which organizes the operations, and handling metadata. This has been the focus of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina during its partnership with the Centre for Economic, Judicial, and Social Study and Documentation (CEDEJ), to digitize more than 800,000 pages of press articles dating back to 1976. This triggered a need to design a workflow to manage such a massive collection proficiently. This required simultaneous intervention of four main aspects; data analysis, developing a digitization workflow , implementing and installing the necessary software tools for metadata entry, and publishing the digital archive. This paper demonstrates the workflow system implemented to manage this massive press collection, yielding more than 400,000 items to date. It illustrates the BA’s Digital Assets Factory (DAF); the nucleus of the digitization process ,and the tools and stages implemented for ingesting data into the system. The outflow is also discussed in terms of organizing and grouping multipart press clips, in addition to reviewing and validating the output. The paper also discusses the challenges of associating the accessible online archive with a powerful search engine supporting multidimensional search.
Funding memory institutions in Ghana: The case of Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD)
(University of Ghana, 2015-05-29) Asamoah, Catherine; Akussah, Prof. Harry; Mensah, Monica
Information is the beacon of organizations globally. The need to properly manage information to serve as evidence of every activity to ensure accountability, transparency and probity is an essential but often ignored practice in most memory institutions worldwide and especially in Africa. Studies have shown that more focus is directed towards media, civil society, human rights and parliamentary democracy to the neglect of memory institutions when it comes to governance issues. Charged with the responsibility to ‘preserve Ghana’s collective memory by facilitating and overseeing the efficient management of records of all MDAs, PRAAD’s mandate has been limited as a result of the department been starved financially. Support to PRAAD over the years has basically come from donor agencies like IRMT, DFID, and IDA of the World Bank, Danish government, National Archives of Netherlands among others. Consequently, this paper explores ways through which PRAAD is funded and attempts to identify ways in which PRAAD can strengthen its funding capacity through nationwide advocacy, publicity and other grant seeking activities. The study was guided by the qualitative paradigm. The Director of PRAAD, together with the heads of all the three departments (records centre, preservation service branch (PSB) and the archives unit) were interviewed. A major finding was that lack of funding and logistics had undermined the role of PRAAD. The paper further emphasized on the need for government to intensify support for PRAAD to enable the department to effectively and competently perform its mandate for the development of Ghana through safeguarding the nation’s collective memory for informed decision making.
Indigenous knowledge in a virtual context: Sustainable digital preservation. A literature review
(Unisa Library (SP PD6), 2015-05-29) le Roux, Annette
The basis of this paper stems from the second African Library Summit, held in 2013. At that event Professor Lawton Hikwa of the National University of Science and Technology of Zimbabwe (NUST) and the author co-facilitated a workshop on Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and digitisation. From discussions at this workshop the following question was posed:  Are there long-term sustainable African digital preservation plans or policies in place to have these heritage materials still available and accessible in the far foreseeable future? To discuss this question, a brief overview of the concept of digital preservation and the challenges of digital preservation is needed.
Institutional policy and management of institutional repositories in Nigerian universities
(University of Nigeria, Nsukka, 2015-05-29) Imo, Nwabuisi T.; Igbo, Harriet U.
The development of institutional repositories in libraries has come as a blessing to universities in Africa. It is envisaged that it will solve problems of low visibility of African content on the World Wide Web (Internet), greater speed of dissemination of knowledge from Africa, increased citation for authors whose works are published in the repository and improved ranking for the universities amongst others. However, evidence from past studies has revealed some doubts about the effectiveness of institutional policies in facilitating the growth and development of academic projects in African universities. The study which is a conceptual one is designed to review the development of IR in Africa with emphasis on Nigerian environment, determine what should constitute an institutional policy, and situate this within the framework of conditions for registration of IR by DOAR and ROAR. The study noted that between June 2011 and December 2014 Africa has dropped from 4% to 3% of world registered IRs. In Nigeria the study pointed out that 106 of 129 registered universities have websites but only eight have registered IR and out of this number only one has policy in some aspects of the operation. It was recommended that government interventions are crucial in this regard as this would serve as watch dog in monitoring/ensuring strict adherence to the implementation of the projects.
Open access institutional repositories: A requirement for academic libraries in the 21st century. A case study of four African universities
(ICADLA4, 2015-05-29) Ibinaiye, Dorcas; Esew, Michael; Atukwase, Thecla; Carte, Sean; Lamptey, Richard
The paper highlights the importance and expectation of a global access to information, open access institutional repositories as a requirement for academic and research libraries. The paper further investigated the challenges faced by four African universities in implementing their open access repositories. A literature review method was adopted by way of questionnaire and observation using ProQuest/Serial solutions summons which was a web scale discovery tool that indexes a wide variety of databases. Population of study comprises of four selected African universities; Ahmadu Bello University(ABU), Zaria, Kaduna State, Nigeria; Kwame Nkrumah University of science and Technology, Ghana; Durban University of Technology (DUT) South Africa; Uganda Christian University (UCU), Uganda. The data collected were analysed using Stellenbosch’s best practices guide, “SUNScholar/practical guidelines for starting an institutional repository (IR)” (Gibson). Findings revealed that; KNUST have both institutional policy and open access policy that currently in draft form and no embargo on open access policy. DUTIR implemented their policy in 2009 without embargo on open access. ABU and UCU have drafted their policy but yet to be implemented. Only 2 KNUST space has documented a formal long term preservation policy as part of their IR policy. Based on research findings, the researchers are not willing to devote time to ensure that their research work is archived, while institutions seem unwilling to commit financially to ensure the sustainability of their repositories. It was recommended that libraries should take proactive steps to make their repositories more successful.
Participants' perception of digitisation and institutional repository training (IR) workshop held in the university of Ghana, Legon
(University of Ghana, 2015-05-29) Owusu, Barfi-Adomako; Kwadzo, Gladys
This paper examines the perception of participants at a three-day workshop on the theme providing practical guidance for effective digital collection programmes at the University of Ghana, Legon. At the workshop, participants were given questionnaire to complete after every session of presentation. The paper analyses the data gathered from the participants on issues relating to relevance of the topic, relevance of material presented, presentation, adequacy of time allotted among others. Participants found the workshop relevant and appropriate as shown by high percentages of participants and high ratings of between three and five. Participants’ responses will provide some guidance to follow up workshops and also guide future organizers about things to look out for when organizing such workshops. To a greater extent the workshop established the need for digitization framework in the university, and policies to guide digitization, institutional repository and copyright.
Rolling out free and open source national heritage system to africa
(Mowbray, South Africa, 2015-05-29) Galimberti, Mariagrazia; Wiltshire, Nicholas
OpenHeritage, a non-profit company based in South Africa, was founded in early 2015 to develop and rollout open source heritage management systems to African countries. These systems aim to foster heritage conservation, improve heritage management processes and increase stakeholder participation in heritage matters. The system supported by OpenHeritage follows the model setup by SAHRIS, South Africa’s national heritage system, which was launched in 2012. Namibia launched their national heritage management system, NAHRIS, in May 2015 and the next rollout is envisaged for Kenya in 2016. The broader vision is to implement the platform in at least 20 countries over the next 5 years. OpenHeritage liaises with each country independently, managing both country-specific software developments, which typically arise from different legislative requirements, and core features that are common to everyone. OpenHeritage has recently partnered with SPECTRUM and is working towards full compliance with their requirements for collections management. We conclude by highlighting some of the cross-border opportunities and benefits for heritage management and research created by OpenHeritage and its partnering countries.
The state of digital heritage resources management in Ghana
(University of Ghana, 2015-05-29) Boamah, Dr Eric; Tackie, Samuel Nii Bekoe
In this paper, we discuss the state of digital heritage resources management in Ghana. The paper is based on a PhD research that explored contextual factors that were either enabling or hindering the management and preservation of digital cultural heritage resources in Ghana. The research employed an interpretive case research design. Data was drawn through semi-structured interviews with 27 key stakeholders from 23 institutions in Ghana. The term Digital Preservation Management (DPM) was used to refer to all the procedures, technologies, information infrastructure and processes involved in the general state of digital cultural heritage resources management and preservation in Ghana. Four main clusters of contextual factors; attitudinal-related, resources-related, policy-related, and management-related factors were found to be influencing DPM in Ghana. Although the DPM innovation was not fully diffused in Ghana, related activities occurring at the base, middle and higher levels of the Ghanaian Social System were inadvertently fostering the adoption process. In addition to the study contributing to theoretical understandings in information systems research in a developing country context, it provides policy developers in Ghana and related countries in African with an empirical base for accelerating DPM adoption.

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