[LIS-Forum] Africa will do well to focus on OA archives

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends:

Peter Suber's blog carries this news story.

African workshop on OA repositories and libraries

UNESCO supports training for building digital libraries in Africa, UNESCO
News, December 20, 2005. A brief report on the Greenstone workshop at the
University of Cape Town, South Africa, November 30 - 1 December 2005.
Excerpt:

    The meeting that was co-organized by UNESCO, the Coalition of South
African Library Consortia (COSALC) and Sivulile, a South African open
access initiative, brought together 30 participants from Ethiopia,
Lesotho, Namibia, New Zealand, Swaziland, Sudan and host country South
Africa. This workshop was the third in a series of activities
organized by COSALC and Sivulile (“we are open” in isiXhosa) aimed at
raising awareness on open access models for information exchange, and
ICT capacity building of information professionals in Africa
institutions. These efforts are aimed at supporting the creation of
digital libraries and providing archivists, librarians in Africa with
skills to utilize electronic information tools and resources in their
work and enhance access to online resources.

---

In my view, it would be better to focus on setting up interoperable
institutional open access archives in African universities and research
laboratories than talking about all-embracing digital libraries. We in
India have been having many national and international conferences on the
topic of digital libraries and these have not taken us far. There is
hardly anything to show on the ground. On the other hand, setting up
archives cost much less and the results are there for all to see. Right
now India cannot boast of great success in setting up OA archives, but
there are some which are filling in fast. The best Indiaj effort is the
GNU EPrints archive at the Indian Institute of Science. The National
Institute of Technology at Rourkela is planning to mandate archiving all
research papers. The National Informatics Centre's OpenMED archive is a
central archive for biomedical research. These are only examples and there
are a few more. And 2006 is expected to see many more archives coming up.

Best wishes.

Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]