An Open Access and Institutional repository workshop was held on the 12-13 June 2007, University of Ghana, Accra. The workshop was presented by the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana (CARLIGH), under the leadership of Helena Asamoah-Hassan, eIFL country coordinator. Susan Veldsman and her team conducted the workshop. All together 15 Institutions, with 24 participants attended....
Feedback from the group was that they were very impressed with the level of presentations, the issues dealt with and what they learned. Everybody thought they knew what IR’s [were] about, but they did confess afterwards that the workshop made them realized that there were more to IR’s than just installing the software. They acknowledged the importance of issues e.g. advocacy in an institution, Copyright, standards in IR’s and the difference in the different software.
Charl Roberts, who presented and demonstrated the technical side of IR’s, prepared a CD for each institution, with all the necessary different IR and operating software and step-by-step instructions for installation. This proved to be very valuable for all the institutions, and very positive comments and appreciation were expressed by them.
In general the group will go back and report to their immediate management who nominated them for participation, and also make a presentation to their Library Committee.
Open Access Conference in Hong Kong
eIFL co-organized an Open Access Conference in Hong Kong with the University of Hong Kong on 17-18 May. Speakers included Heather Joseph of SPARC, Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust, Leslie Chan of Bioline International, Colin Steele of Australia National Library, Diana Chan from the City University of Hong Kong, Roland Chin of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, Melissa Hagemann, and Prof. Xiaolin Zhang of the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Over 80 participants from the eight universities in Hong Kong attended. There was strong support from the participants to adopt mandates for deposit of material in their universities’ repositories. In addition, Prof. Zhang’s presentation was quite interesting, as he provided a great overview of the obstacles he has faced in trying to promote OA within the Academy over the past two years since our conference there in 2005 and the strategies he has devised to overcome these problems. The full conference program as well as links to the presentations are available at lib.hku.hk.
eIFL IR Workshop in partnership with the Carnegie Research Library Consortium
During 2006, three major university libraries in South Africa (University of Cape Town, University of Kwa Zulu-Natal and University of Witwatersrand) received a Carnegie Grant over a three year period. These grantees have named themselves the Carnegie Research Library Consortium. One of the outcomes of this grant will be, that in each institution, interoperable institutional repositories should have been set up. A workshop will be held on the 16-19 July, where all the relevant issues of IR’s will be discussed. The challenging outcome of this workshop will be to set up a workplan, with a list of activities and responsibilities over a three year period, in order to comply with the grant.
eIFL Harvests metadata of member countries
eIFL is in the process, with the assistance of DARE, to harvest the metadata of 59 existing institutional repositories in the members countries. Herewith eIFL tries to determine the value, possibility, problems and viability of harvesting metadata. We hope that the data will be available in July for evaluation. This repository will represent a collation of developing country repositories, a first internationally!
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/10/2007 04:50:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
