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:
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.
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