Theme: Strengthening Institutional Repositories to support teaching, learning and research

The covid-19 pandemic has shown why it is urgent that African Universities have E-content in our institutions to support the academic environment. The covid19 pandemic exposed our inadequacies in having enough E-resources to support virtual learning/teaching in African HEIs. Some African HEIs and their students had no online resources they could rely on and even where it was available, its completeness and ease of access by students and faculty proved to be a challenge . The need to have online E-content has also been further highlighted by the unfortunate fire outbreaks that has destroyed the physical content of some HEIs on the continent. It is time for all in the knowledge management  Creators Cycle (researchers) and Managers (Information Professionals) to critically look at building strong platforms to support E-content development and make them available online to support the core mandates (teaching, learning and research) of our HEIs.

In line with reducing  these inadequacies and building a more resilient higher education system,  the Association of African universities is collaborating with the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, CUEA, Kenya, to organize a workshop on strengthening Institutional Repositories to provide the platform for building a critical mass of E-content for our institutions. This is an in-person training workshop and participants are expected to be onsite.

Why  is this workshop being held in-person in a pandemic and social distancing era

• The workshop is totally hands-on with on-site guidance for real time implementation
• Experience from previous hands-on training shows participants coming with computers that require fixing because of the different operating systems, before it can be used in the training (this fixing is difficult to carry out online)
• There will be a day when each participating institution will have personal reviews of plans and also repository reviews for institutions that have an existing platform

 Who should attend the workshop?  

Directors of Research, Researchers, Librarians, IT Staff supporting Libraries, and Information Professionals. Institutions with the following challenges are especially encouraged to attend.

• Institutions with repositories that have gone silent in the wake of the covid19 pandemic.
• Institutions that have been unable to update their repositories for earlier versions
• Institutions having problems with making their repositories harvestable
• Institutions having challenges with their advocacy and copyright policies
• Institutions having difficulty with digitizing records for upload unto their repositories

The workshop will also provide the avenue to discuss taking steps to safeguard physical collections against disasters.

Participants will be required to attend the workshop with a laptop. Those coming from institutions with repositories should have administrative access to their institutional repository. There will be two (2) days dedicated to holding clinics with each participating institution, where their repository will be reviewed with them. Institutions looking to set up their repositories are also welcomed to attend

Covid19 Protocols will be strictly adhered to in all sessions

Workshop dates are July 26 – 30, 2021.

Rate is $500 per participant (Covers conference package which includes meals, cost of conference venue and conference material)

Registration Link is here https://event-mgt.aau.org/event/52/

For further information, please contact (acorletey@aau.org);  +233264655185 (Whatsapp only) and Dr Everlyn Anduvare (data-r2021@cuea.edu); +254733758162