Digital Libraries & Heritage Sites

We had Prof Hussein Suleman from UCT's department of computer science as a guest presenter in our class this week. Prof Suleman is passionate about digital libraries,  especially as a resource to support education in poor countries. The topic of his talk was digital libraries and digital preservation from an African perspective. With his team of postgraduate students at UCT, he is conducting research with particular emphasis on the poor countries of the world with their associated unique constraints, such as cultural differences, limited Internet bandwidth and limited access to skilled staff.

South Africa (and Africa) needs a different perspective because of:

• Deterioration of documents, (some storytellers are the last in their generation)
• Rewriting history - educate people about contributions by every culture
• Lack of skills and education . Digital media is not the norm for many forms of communication and information storage
• Limited availability of funding for projects
• Digital divide: economic and social inequalities 
• Poor internet bandwidth

Examples of digital collections: 

• Mapungubwe Collection

Image: http://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/589

 The Digital Bleek and Lloyd

Image: http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/

Image: http://lloydbleekcollection.cs.uct.ac.za/

Numerous new collections are being created within institutional repositories and digital archives in public institutions and institutions of higher learning. While it is very important to preserve at-risk information, new knowledge that is being created on an ongoing bases must be part of  any digital preservation strategy.

Open Access

The topic for Tuesday's class was Open Access and Institutional Repositories. One of the advantages of doing this particular module is that I have started to read extensively on these topics. It has also deepened my understanding of the Open Access movement.

Open Access refers to  unrestricted, free, online access to scholarly material. It is seen as a way of improving the supply of scholarly publications, since closed access to scholarly materials is available only to those whose institutions can pay for it.

The demand for  open access has grown rapidly with the rapid pace of internet adoption and development and the movement gained momentum in South Africa in 2010. South Africa adopted O.A. practices by means of the development of Institutional Repositories (I.R). Institutional repositories are digital collections of the research outputs at a university, eg. SUNScholar at Stellenbosch University.  It preserves and  makes the institution's intellectual capital accessible while at the same time it becomes part of a global system of scholarly publishing.

The Open Access Movement removes barriers to academic literature and offers opportunities to participate in the wider research and teaching community, and in doing so, reducing the digital divide.

Published by Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen

Achieving Open Access is however not easy. Bjork (2004) discussed the barriers to open access in  "Open Access–Are the Barriers to Change Receding".

This quote by Bjork (2004) sums up the movement to open access perfectly: 

"Trying  to  get  researchers  to  support  the  move  towards  open  access,  which  most agree  would be  good  for  the  advancement  of  science  in  principle,  is  like  trying to get people to behave in a more ecological  way.  While most  people  recognize the need to save energy and recycle waste, it takes more than just awareness to get them to change their habits on a large scale. It takes a combination of measures of many different kinds, such as, technical waste, disposal infrastructure, legislation and taxation to get massive behavioral changes underway."

Looking forward to this afternoon's presentation on Digital Libraries & Heritage Sites by Prof Hussein Suleman of the UCT Department of Computer Science.

Tweet, tweet!

I had renewed interest in Web 2.0 (especially  blogs, and twitter) since our last class about Altmetrics. Initially, I signed up for a twitter account a few years ago out of pure curiosity and I seldom  paid any attention to twitter until last year when I followed the #feesmustfall campaign. However, during the last week I became an active tweeter and I am learning something new everyday. I have professionalized my twitter page and started following people and topics of interest, such as Altmetrics, digital curation, research and of course the subject areas for which I am responsible in our academic library.

I came across some very interesting articles such as Laura Czerniewicz's article on How do students access the resources they need? Survey finds only one in five obtain all resources legally, which I might have found useful for my essay on Generation Y students. Needless to say, my knowledge base has expanded significantly during this course, both academically and on a professional level. I have added my twitter page to my libguides which means I have to keep up to date with publications and news in my departments.

I found this interesting blog with information on how to professionalize your social media while trying to increase twitter engagement.

© 2014 Zakeena. Licensed under CC-BY. 

Looking forward to tonight's class. I might just tweet about it!

Altmetrics

Last night's class was on Altmetrics. We had a very enthusiastic guest speaker, Ms Natasha Langdown, who is the  Chief Information Officer at South African Medical Research Council. She is currently doing a PhD at University of Western Cape,  with altmetrics as her topic. 

Natasha had a wealth of information to share. I was very excited about the presentation because although it is a topic which I am familiar with, I felt I had limited knowledge about it. I always find it more interesting  listening to an expert about a topic than reading about it, and this was indeed the case. She knows her topic well and explained that her interest in Altmetrics grew from her love of social media. 

 
Powerpoint by: Natasha Langdown

Altmetrics  was proposed in 2010, as an alternative to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and the h-index. It is a new way of measuring research.  In the context of academic research, Altmetrics  measure the impact of an article by how many mentions appear in social media (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.). We were introduced to tools available to librarians and the exciting options that we have as professionals to play a role in  supporting research with altmetric tools.

 

Image:  https://www.altmetric.com/support/

So today I viewed my Twitter page and decided that it's definitely in need of some professional change. For the next few days I am going to think of ways to incorporate these tools into my job as a faculty librarian.

Digital Curation and other stuff

I have not been able to write on my blog for a while now. Assignments and presentations are due and juggling between work, family and studies is definitely a challenge. However, I feel more positive about my studies and I suppose it takes time to get into  the academic mode.

We had a break from class for one week and we started off the second term with a  guest speaker on Digital Curation. Much to our surprise it was our very own Mrs. Witbooi who came to share with us her knowledge on digital curation given that she participated in a course offered by UCT some time ago. I had a limited understanding of the topic and found the presentation to be very informative.

For me, the word curation brings to mind visions of archives and museums. I thought it was the digitization of older materials which are not electronically available. I was partly wrong. Digital curation involves the  active long-term management of digital material. It is a relatively new term which incorporates existing concepts such as data curation and  digital transformation and is still an evolving discipline.

The current definition of the Digital Curation Centre for its activity is:
“Digital curation, broadly interpreted, is about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use.” The benefits of digital curation include: persistant access to reliable data, improved quality of data itself, preserving and protecting  data against loss or obsolescence, etc.

We were introduced to the digital curation life cycle which provides an overview of the stages required for successful curation and preservation and ultimately use thereof.

Manjula Patel, 2008 Presentation

 

Follow @digitalcuration on Twitter

Because digital curation is a relatively new concept, it provides information professionals with an opportunity to learn new skills and competencies. I was once again amazed at how much the library profession has to offer and how many opportunities there are for the next generation of librarians.

Tonight's lecture is on Altmetrics by a guest speaker. Looking forward to learning something new. 

Despite the workload, due dates, work and family responsibilities I am really enjoying the course and I am learning so much about so many different topics.