REPORT BACK: OA ACTIVITIES

[Susan Veldsman]

DEAR COLLEAGUES,

 

This might be “old” news to you, but I am repeating the headlines of our
activities within eIFL, as we have added a lot of people on the OA-list and
I thought it might be of interest to them?

 

What are the main issues for eIFL thus far?

 

1. eIFL Institutional Repository Survey

 

During January 2007 eIFL conducted an Institutional Repository survey
amongst its 50 members. The purpose of the survey was to:

 

+ establish which member countries have institutional repositories, and at
which institutions

+ which countries has no institutional repositories and

+ if they don’t have one do they intend to set up repositories and when

+ establish IR training needs among member countries

+ establish if there are any government initiatives to mandate OA policies 

 

There were 34 respondents to this survey. There were 15 countries with IR’s
currently available in their countries with a total of 50 individual IR’s.

 

2. This survey assisted eIFL to formulate a few strategies to take the whole
OA initiative forward:

 

+ A possible co-operation is being considered with SURF, to assist with the
harvesting of metadata of these repositories, hereby creating an eIFL
repository of developing countries. We are currently busy negotiating with
SURF and we are well on track to set up a pilot project. This pilot project
will help us to determine how harvestable our data are, and show us which
other standards we should consider.

+setting up repositories in those countries that are ready for it

+ record and create a pool of expertise within eIFL

+record the details of IR’s within eIFL

+register all eIFL repositories via OpenDoar

+advocacy workshops

+additional training

 

3. Assisting with creating awareness to set up IR’s

 

National Institutional repositories and Open Access for scholarly
communication: a sensitization workshop took place at the State Library,
Maseru, Lesotho on April 24-26. Susan Veldsman  attended this important
event for the library community in Lesotho and for Swaziland. Hussein
Suleman, Eve Gray and Monica Hammes were the resource people who joined her.
The two eIFL country coordinators involved in Lesotho and Swaziland, Drs
Matseliso Moshoeshoe-Chadzingwa and Zipho Ngcobo gave the participants a
very interesting and insightful overview of their specific countries
challenges and research status. This meeting was well attended by 40
librarians (systems, acquisitions and information), researchers, lectors,
registrars and PVC’s of institution. The presentations were well received
and attendees were left inspired and motivated.

 

The action points that were identified at the end of the workshop by ways of
discussion groups were:

 

How to convince researchers and management

 

-        Do more research on IR/OA to be better informed, look up other
archives that are Open Access

-        Spread the message by word-of-mouth

-        Set up steering committees

-        Look into cost implications to convince management

-        Approach IT people for more support, then approach
management/researchers

-        Install and experiment with open software for IR’s

-        Find active researchers who publish and mentor, find management
champions

-        Try to determine how they will resist and deal with this by
formulating active policies

-        Educate researchers and management

-        Argue for immediate recognition of research

 

An Open Access and Institutional repository sensitization workshop will be
held by Susan Veldsman and her team in Ghana on 12-13 June 2007. Helena
Asamoah Hassan , eIFL country coordinator, will be facilitating this
workshop in Ghana.

 

Melissa Hagemann and Prof. Xiaolin Zhang of the Library of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences have participated in the eIFL sponsored Conference
"Promoting 21st Century Scholarly Communication: The Open Access and
Institutional Repository Movements” in Hong Kong on 17-18 May. Additional
information is available at HYPERLINK
"http://lib.hku.hk/scholarly_communication/conf/index.html" \nlib.hku.hk

 

Hope this has proved to be of interest? 

 

BUT……what is going on your country in terms of OA and setting up IR’s .
Would you like to share with us? Please reply to this e-mail….and we  can
all “see” what you are doing?

 

Hope to hear from you soon.

 

KIND REGARDS

SUSAN

 

 

+++++++++++++++++++++

Susan Veldsman

eIFL content Manager

 

30 O'Reill Merry Street

Northmead

1510

South Africa

 

Tel: +27 11 425 4736

Fax: +27 11 425 4737

 

+++++++++++++++++++++

 


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