22 -25 August, 2022

Theme: Restructuring  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 covid-19 pandemic exposed our inadequacy in having enough E-resources to support virtual learning/teaching in African HEIs. African HEIs and their students had no online resources they could rely on.

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 cycle Creators (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 HEIs core mandates (teaching, learning and research) of our HEIs.

It is to help reduce this inadequacy that the Association of African universities is collaborating with the Africa Digital Libraries Support Network and cordially invites you to 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 in-person workshop?

• 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 had 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 the making their repositories harvestable
• Institutions having challenges with their advocacy and copyright policies
• For institutions having difficulty with digitizing records for upload unto their repositories

The workshop will also provide the avenue to discuss taking steps to safeguard our 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 2 days dedicated to holding clinics with each participating institution, where their repository will be reviewed with them. Institutions looking to setting up their repositories are also welcomed to attend

Covid19 Protocols will be strictly adhered to in all sessions

The Rate is $500 per participant for AAU members in good standing and $600 for Non-Members (Covers conference package which include meals, conference venue, certificates and conference material)

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

For any further information, please contact Abednego Corletey (acorletey@aau.org); +233264655185 (Whatsapp only)

NB: There will be a discussion on a provision now available for institutions to host their repositories free on the cloud. These institutions will be supported to setup their institutional repositories