Overcoming barriers to wider FOSS use in African libraries

In November 2011, with support from UNESCO, EIFL-FOSS organised a regional training seminar in Tanzania, bringing together FOSS librarians and library directors from 14 African countries for two days of training and activities (read the original news item).

As part of the follow-up activities from that event, we surveyed the participants, asking questions about their progress in a variety of areas since the event. Twenty-four of the 26 participants responded, representing 13 of the 14 countries in attendance.

We asked the participants a variety of questions about both their achievements and any barriers to further success they had identified.

The responses suggest that much is happening with FOSS in African libraries. No less than 17 of the 24 respondents stated that they had held workshops on specific FOSS tools since the event, with the most common focus being Koha (7) or DSpace (4). Five countries had held national FOSS workshops focussing on a variety of tools.

However the number of implementations since the event is even more impressive. Across 13 countries that responded to the survey, there were reported over 50 implementations in total since the event, with no country reporting zero implementations. Again Koha was the most common (18) along with DSpace (14), but other software seemed to be in high demand, including Greenstone (5), SubjectsPlus (4) as well as seven other tools.

Other positive developments reported demonstrated a lot of positivity about the future, some respondents reporting having obtained funding for key projects (such as installing FOSS repository software at 10 institutions) while others had applied for funding and were awaiting responses (such as for country-wide training initiatives). One country is planning to visit a neighbouring country to gather information on how it has achieved its successes.  Another country that has created a union catalogue across three libraries is taking that knowledge out to more institutions while at the same time forging ahead with federated access technologies in the same three libraries.

However many successes there are, barriers still remain in some areas. Two barriers were reported more widely than any others:

• there remains a lack of face-to-face training opportunities for librarians. Many participants reported that often librarians are not sufficiently confident to download an installation guide and attempt installation alone, they prefer face-to-face training to build their confidence, or at least a step-by-step guide with access to an individual for support;
• although library directors are starting to become aware of FOSS and what it means, there is still a common perception that “sending someone on a training course” is sufficient to enable a library to maximise the potential of FOSS. Continued advocacy work is required to not only explain the full range of FOSS possibilities to library directors but also to help them to understand the much longer term commitment that is needed from them in order for their library to fully utilise all that FOSS technologies have to offer. 

Other barriers were reported much less commonly by the survey respondents. These included infrastructure issues (insufficient networked PCs, internet speed and reliability); difficulty in establishing working relationships between libraries and their institution's IT teams; and a lack of FOSS coverage in Library and Information Systems courses.

Despite the continuing presence of barriers to progress, respondents were incredibly upbeat about the future. When asked if another FOSS training and networking event in a few years' time would be useful, there was an overwhelmingly positive response. When asked what the focus of the event should be, the three most popular responses were:

• Training on the latest FOSS tools at that time,
• Bringing together EIFL FOSS people from across the full EIFL network (not only Africa),
• Reporting success stories of implementations as a result of the seminar in Tanzania.

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