Building Collaboration for an Institutional Repository in Africa: Transcending Barriers, Creating Opportunities

Abstract

The contributions of African scholars living in Africa to world knowledge heritage are limited when compared with their counterparts elsewhere. Many scholars have adduced diverse reasons for this state of affairs, including the scattered and uncoordinated nature of their contributions, the low impact level of their publishing outlets which limits the visibility of such contributions, poor infrastructure for the utilization of information technologies, and low level of collaboration between and among scholars across the continent. More importantly, there is little or no collaboration among libraries and librarians for the purpose of information sharing. To address these gaps, a description of the collaboration between the librarians and systems librarians of the University of Lagos, Nigeria and their counterparts in the University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana is presented. A focal point of the collaboration is the sharing of experience about digitization projects and institutional repositories (IR) of the two universities. Issues discussed range from the formulation of take-off plans and strategy for digitization of library holdings, the management of the IR, and information sharing. A sequential evidence-based experience from the two universities that have successfully deployed their IR informed this analysis. Experiences of other libraries outside Africa are also found very useful. The article ends on a note of recommendation of a framework for collaboration among librarians and libraries in Africa.