ADLSN trainers take part in a digital library workshop at the African Union Commission (AUC) Library and Archives
U.S. Mission to the African Union (USAU), in collaboration with the African Union Commission (AUC) Library and Archives, hosted a digital library workshop at Addis Ababa. The training, which brought trainers from the African Digital Library Support Network (ADLSN) based in both Addis Ababa and Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, centered on addressing the technical gap that currently exist as the AUC Archives staff works to create a common continental domain for information sharing, preserving the AU’s documents and protecting the organization’s data.
Making African content more visible globally 
There are increased numbers of local content in digital format from Africa in a form of research output or heritage materials.
However the visibility of African content globally is so limited. This is due to fact that the digital collections in many of African institutions are either in disorganized format within scattered computers of individuals or are centrally deposited but there is no global connection to these materials. For example, out of 2256 repositories listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) at www.opendoar.org, only 60 repositories are in Africa, which is 2.66% of total repositories in DOAR (Accessed on 29th January, 2013)
There are many reasons as to why, Africa’s content has a limited accessibility or visibility, few among those reasons are:
- Limited awareness
- Limited technical skills
- Poor ICT infrastructure including lack of hosting facilities
African Digital Library Support Network (ADLSN), in collaboration with Koha Foundation and EIFL, has just launched a project that aims at:
- To study the current situation of African digital repositories,
- To pilot a centralized hosting solution for those institutions that have digital collections but with poor infrastructure to make them accessible globally.
The project will be piloted in nine countries, namely; Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Lesotho and Mauritius. If you are interested to be part of this project in any way please contact: Project Management team at Teklemichael.Wordofa@adlsn.org or Africa.bwamkuu@adlsn.org
