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Under construction: Connecting-Africa African studies community portal

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

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Under construction: Connecting-Africa African studies community portal

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  1. Under construction: Connecting-Africa African studies community portal for research and higher education July 2005 Titia van der Werf Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden, NL

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. Approach: • By developing jointly a service to the benefit of all participants • Based on existing building blocs • Database of Africanists in the Netherlands • Embedded in national infrastructures • DARE (Digital Academic Repositories) • NOD (Dutch Research Database)

  5. IMPLEMENTATION MODEL DARE Subject Gateway Connecting Africa DAREnet Search H H H IR IR IR IR IR IR IR ORG ORG ORG ORG ORG ORG ORG

  6. IMPLEMENTATION MODEL DARC University- department Dutch Research Database Input module Request info DARC Harvester IR University Library Connecting-Africa African Studies Portal

  7. 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)

  8. 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)

  9. 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

  10. 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 …

  11. AFRICAN STUDIES • distributed community • interdisciplinary • niche research area • Strong starting points for • developing virtual community • pulling in Africa-related research • achieving cross-sectoral synergies

  12. 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.

  13. Connecting • African Studies • Globally !

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