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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Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 12
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.