Digital Libraries (DLs) are important for Africa as they will enable the creation of local content, strengthen the mechanisms and capacity of civil society, and increase the portability, efficiency of access, flexibility, availability and preservation of content.

The open source Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL) software suite (http://www.greenstone.org/), whose development and distribution are coordinated by the University of Waikato in New Zealand, provides a unique resource to promote the development of DLs in Africa. Greenstone is a user-friendly, multi-lingual, multi-platform package for the assembling electronic documents into digital collections and for publishing these collections on the Web or on CD-ROM. It accepts documents in a wide range of proprietary and standard formats, supports numerous standards for document and metadata exchange, including compliance with OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), and readily converts bibliographic databases created under UNESCO's CDS/ISIS package into publishable digital libraries, including the full texts of the referenced documents if available.

This sub-regional Greenstone support effort follows on from a pilot project carried out during 2007-2008. Funding for the pilot project and for the current project has been provided by the Koha Foundation (Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A.).