Accra, March 16, Ghanadot/GNA - Heads of tertiary institutions
and academic researchers in Africa are meeting in Accra to
deliberate on providing regional and national data base systems
to improve the management and access of African scholarly works.
The three-day international seminar organized by the Association
of African Universities (AAU) in conjunction with other partners
would also discuss policy guidelines that would clearly spell
out the operations of such data systems, known as Institutional
Repositories in Africa.
Professor Goolam Mohammedbhai, Secretary General of AAU said at
the opening of the seminar on Monday that the AAU in 1998 saw
the need to create a common platform to manage and disseminate
theses and dissertations of African Universities electronically.
He said the AAU therefore, initiated a project dubbed; the
Database on African Theses and Dissertation (DATAD) programme
to, among other objectives, facilitate the development of
copyright procedures and regulations to protect intellectual
property rights of African university graduates and researchers.
Since 2003, Prof. Mohammedbhai said, 14,723 records had been
received on a similar database developed for the continent.
“There are over 700 registered users on the database with more
than 60 institutions from 25 different countries and about 600
individuals from 65 countries using the database,” he added.
The Secretary-General therefore expressed the hope that with
such facilities in every country, scholarly works in Africa
would be further promoted.
Prof. Mohammedbhai also pledged AAU’s commitment to technically
support all countries that wished to establish national
repository centres.
Mr Alex Tettey-Enyo, Minister of Education, in a speech read on
his behalf deplored lack of resources for research in Africa,
despite its importance for development.
He therefore commended the initiative of AAU to create such data
base systems that would make African research publications more
accessible both to Africans themselves and the other continents.
Mr. Tettey-Enyo therefore proposed that national repositories
should be further supported to exchange data among libraries at
the national level.
Mr Paul Effah, Executive Secretary of the National Council of
Tertiary Education, said the seminar was a wake up call to the
intellectual community in Africa to use information
communication technology to collect, preserve and disseminate
information in view of recent challenges faced in running
traditional libraries.
He called for incentives for graduates and researchers who come
out with outstanding scholarly works in order to motivate more
people to undertake research work.
The Consortium of Academic Research Libraries in Ghana and the
Royal Tropical Institute of the Netherlands are assisting the
AAU to organise the seminar.
GNA
