Sokoine National Agricultural Library

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://10.10.97.169:4000/handle/123456789/1

Browse

Browsing Sokoine National Agricultural Library by Subject "Africa"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Africa's contribution to the global open access literature
    (2018-06) Chirwa, M. N.; Sife, A. S.
    This study was conducted to determine the contribution of Africa to the global open access literature. Data were extracted from the Directory of Open Access Repository (OpenDOAR). The findings indicate that only 22 (40.74%) African countries contributed 155 OA repositories in the OpenDOAR. Most of these repositories were from South Africa (33; 21.29%), Kenya (28; 18.06%) and Nigeria (21; 13.55%). Africa contributed 1,024,851 documents in the OpenDOAR, with Egypt and South Africa contributing nearly two thirds (634,025; 61.2%) of these documents. Despite its large size, the African continent had only 4.52% of the OA repositories and 0.14% of documents in the OpenDOAR. The average number of documents per repository in Africa was only 6,611.94 as compared to other continents such as Australasia (752,094.80 documents), Europe (342,896.64 documents) and North America (201,997.12 documents). The top 25 OA repositories in Africa contributed 820,574 documents, which is over 80% of the total African contribution to the OpenDOAR. Most OA repositories in Africa contained journal articles (74.84%) and they were multidisciplinary (61.73%). Overall, Africa’s contribution to the global open access literature is still very low. Efforts should be strengthened to increase the level of research and publication productivity as well as increase the capacity of institutions to develop OA repositories.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The role of Institutional Repositories in making lost or hidden cultures accessible, a study across four African University Libraries
    (DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 2018) Malekani, A. W.; Kavishe, G.
    This study was undertaken to uncover the potential role that Institutional Repositories (IR) can offer to preserve in the long term the special collections (especially cultural heritage materials) so as to reap the advantages that these collections offer in terms of intellectual development in Africa. The study involved use of scoping review which involves five stages: research question, identifying the relevant study, selecting the study, developing a narrative review (charting data), summarizing (collating) data and an optional consultation step. The study also involved a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) involving participants in the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme at the University of Pretoria from various universities in sub-Saharan Africa. The study found that the potential roles of IRs were mainly centered in three levels: at user level, researcher level and the institution level. In the cultural heritage context, the study found that IR offers opportunities to enjoy replicas of artefacts and museum environments from a distance and to avoid the spatial and temporal limitations of an actual visit to a museum. In turn, the increased accessibility of cultural contents would underpin a process of democratization of culture, which openly resonated, with the main proposals of the New Museology thinking of the 1970s and 1980s. Based on this study, it is recommended that the rich culture of Africa stored in the name of special collections should be made known to the world and whoever wishes to know more about the continent and its culture.