Under construction: Connecting-Africa

African studies community portal

for research and higher education

July 2005

Titia van der Werf

Afrika-Studiecentrum

Leiden, NL

PROJECT DARC

Distributed Africana Repositories Community

Funding: SURF Foundation

1st Tender 2003: € 46.800

2nd Tender 2004: € 140.000

Partners:

Afrika-Studiecentrum

Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences

University of Amsterdam

University of Groningen

University of Leiden

University of Wageningen

Focus:

Research in the Netherlands

Aim:

•Strengthen African Studies in the Netherlands: more unity and visibility on the web

•Improve access to Dutch research material via the Internet

•Foster exchanges and co-operation in Dutch research and higher education

Approach:

By developing jointly a service to the benefit of all participants

•Based on existing building blocsDatabase of Africanists in the Netherlands

•Embedded in national infrastructuresDARE (Digital Academic Repositories)NOD (Dutch Research Database)

ConnectingAfrica DAREnet

Search

SubjectGateway

H

H

H

IR IR IR IR IRIR IR

ORG ORG ORG ORG ORG ORG ORG

IMPLEMENTATION MODEL DARE

IMPLEMENTATION MODEL DARC

Inputmodule

IRUniversityLibrary

Dutch Research Database

DARCHarvester

Requestinfo

Connecting-AfricaAfrican Studies Portal

University-department

Core community

•350 Africanists in the Netherlands

•110 university units and research schools

Interested parties

•Dutch academics doing research on Africa

•Africanists from elsewhere; policy-makers; NGO staff; journalists; etc.

Content

•metadata records (approx. 2000)

•with links to full-text publications (approx. 300)

•digitised publications of the ASC (approx.100)

Repositories harvested:

Site Records•University Leiden: 1941•University Groningen: 3565•University of Amsterdam: 15474•Wageningen University: 103227

Total of 124245 records harvested

Records filtered:

Approx.300 records filtered with list of African country and regions names (excl. Wageningen)

Software development

1. OAI Harvest Manager

•Based on open source software

•Enhanced with a scheduler and other functionalities

•Available as open source software

2. OAI Harvest Analyser

•Developed from scratch

•Matches harvested records with controlled vocabularies

•Filtering mechanism based on weighted results

•Will be made available as open source software

AFRICAN STUDIES

are not restricted to the Netherlands

…

we also harvested the repository of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (SOAS)

see title 25 on next sheet …

AFRICAN STUDIES

•distributed community

•interdisciplinary

•niche research area

Strong starting points for

•developing virtual community

• pulling in Africa-related research

•achieving cross-sectoral synergies

FUTURE of CONNECTING-AFRICA

•cover African Studies in the Netherlands

•harvest other OAI repositories containing African Studies material

•encourage colleagues in Europe to deposit material in OAI compliant repositories

•encourage African colleague research institutions to set up OAI compliant repositories (harvest content from Africa)

•enlarge the community with specialists on Africa from NGO’s, the media, governments, etc.

Connecting

African Studies

Globally !