On Wednesday, July 1st, 2009, the First International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives (ICADLA-1) opened at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The three day conference brought together African and international stakeholders in African digitization to discuss ‘critical policy issues and explore approaches and challenges facing Africa in relation to the digitization of African resources; promote ways of strengthening, coordinating and forging stronger links between African digitization initiatives, networks, projects and policies’.

The presentations were organized around the following themes and issues: the role of knowledge in governance and socio-economic development; strategies and policies for Africa’s digital future; best practices in digitization, institutional repositories; intellectual property rights in the information revolution age; and access and sharing.

Siro Masinde, Regional Coordinator for Africa, JSTOR/Aluka, attended the conference and also exhibited. JSTOR is an important stakeholder at ICADLA-1 because of its involvement in expanding access to digital resources in Africa by providing free access to its archives. The Aluka Initiative on the other hand is involved in the digitization, aggregation and dissemination of primary source materials from and about Africa.

Top left: Siro Masinde at ICADLA-1 conference. Top right: Patricia Liebetrau (left) of Digital Innovation of South Africa, a JSTOR partner institution, with Peter Okwaro (right) of Centre for Heritage Development in Africa discussing by JSTOR/Aluka booth.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Archives, Preservation, and Higher Education, Stories from the Field, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.