Location

CTICC – Terrace room

Session Number

Plen 3.2

Description

Sabinet facilitates collaboration between various role players in the African region in an effort to create the most comprehensive collection of African research content in the world. By collaborating with publishers, libraries and faculty at institutions, Sabinet is bringing together full-text content published in journals and institutional repositories, on a single and easily accessible platform.

The initiative was started in 1998 with a project to collect and make available African journal content online. The aim was, for the first time, to create a central full-text collection of journal content containing important African research across a number of fields, including medical, social sciences and environmental. In 2007, the project was boosted further when Sabinet was awarded a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to retrospectively digitize and make available an archive of the content of journals that was published prior to the start of the initiative. There are now more than 340 journals available online, containing more than 200 000 articles. Recently, Sabinet has extended collaboration with academic institutions by harvesting and incorporating content published in institutional repositories into the central platform. This collection of unique African research content is now available to local and international organisations. The result of this collaboration has a unique value, providing not only the vital groundwork for further or related research but assisting to preserve the heritage of the African continent whilst at the same time providing valuable world-wide exposure to African publishers.

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Apr 18th, 9:00 AM

CREATION OF A DIGITAL AFRICAN ARCHIVE THROUGH COLLABORATION

CTICC – Terrace room

Sabinet facilitates collaboration between various role players in the African region in an effort to create the most comprehensive collection of African research content in the world. By collaborating with publishers, libraries and faculty at institutions, Sabinet is bringing together full-text content published in journals and institutional repositories, on a single and easily accessible platform.

The initiative was started in 1998 with a project to collect and make available African journal content online. The aim was, for the first time, to create a central full-text collection of journal content containing important African research across a number of fields, including medical, social sciences and environmental. In 2007, the project was boosted further when Sabinet was awarded a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to retrospectively digitize and make available an archive of the content of journals that was published prior to the start of the initiative. There are now more than 340 journals available online, containing more than 200 000 articles. Recently, Sabinet has extended collaboration with academic institutions by harvesting and incorporating content published in institutional repositories into the central platform. This collection of unique African research content is now available to local and international organisations. The result of this collaboration has a unique value, providing not only the vital groundwork for further or related research but assisting to preserve the heritage of the African continent whilst at the same time providing valuable world-wide exposure to African publishers.