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]