The power of the worldwide web to facilitate collaborative activity is unprecedented. From open source software development to networked social communities to online auctions to online encyclopedias, people are contributing their knowledge, their expertise and their energy in completely new ways. These efforts are creating information, entertainment and learning spaces of a scale that are beyond what we could have imagined even a few years ago. How can the scholarly community take fuller advantage of these new forces?
Aluka, a not-for-profit initiative housed at Ithaka, is testing the potential for these phenomena to transform access to, and the use of, important scholarly resources from and about Africa. Through the creation of a powerful platform for using these materials, support and training to assist local efforts to digitize materials within Africa, and the development of a network of institutional and individual collaborators, Aluka aims to serve as a focal point for cooperative activity that will serve scholarship by making it easy to find and use valuable African scholarly content. An important component of this effort will be enabling those with scholarly collections to contribute those collections efficiently.
Aluka is demonstrating the power of this concept through the creation of three initial content areas. They are African Plants, African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes, and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa. Brief descriptions of each content area are provided below:
African Plants: This content area comprises scientific data contributed by the African Plants Initiative (API), a collaboration among more than 50 institutions in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Partnering with Aluka, API's long-term goal is to build a comprehensive online research tool aggregating and linking presently scattered scholarly resources about African plants, thereby dramatically improving access for students, scholars, and scientists around the globe.
African Culture Heritage Sties and Landscapes: This content area links high-quality visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of significant heritage sites in Africa. The digital library includes photographs, 3D models, geographic information systems (GIS) data, site plans, images of rock art, excavation reports, manuscripts, traveler’s accounts, historical and antiquarian maps, books, articles, and other scholarly research.
Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa: This content area documents the liberation struggles in Southern Africa by way of a carefully selected set of archival documents, periodicals, nationalist publications, newspaper clippings, organizational records, personal papers of historical figures, oral histories, photographs, and other visual materials. In phase one of the project the focus is on six countries: Angola, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
This session will provide an introduction to Aluka and engage in an open discussion of the initial content areas, as well as the general concept being tested. What steps should Aluka take to best unleash the power of collaboration for the benefit of Africa and for the benefit of scholarship about Africa?
http://www.aluka.org
http://www.ithaka.org
Handout (PDF)
PowerPoint Presentation
