Unhiding African collections: SCOLMA presentation 2013

Rachel Playforth

Repository Coordinator

9 July 2013

SCOLMA Annual Conference

Unhiding African collections at the British Library for

Development Studies

Our collection

National resource for development studies

Largest research collection on economic and social development in Europe

Over 200,000 titles, 1 million physical items

60% published in developing countries

High proportion of unique holdings

Cataloguing figures

Unhiding 1: retrospective conversion

Pre-1988 government publications from Southern countries23000 online records createdComplete holdings of Anglophone African government publications now on OPAC25% of all card recordsResource-intensive!Illustration by Adam Rex from Chu’s Day by Neil Gaimon

http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_books/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/20130508-211850.jpg

Unhiding 2: article indexing

175 journals indexed in OPACMostly published in the SouthDetailed subject headings applied at article levelAbstracts where possible

Unhiding 3: digitisation

Series papers from Southern research institutesTo be hosted at BLDS in a digital libraryDigitised material also returned to the original instituteRationale: inherent value + pragmatism

Staffing and workflow

Kept in-house (Project Assistants worked on every stage)

Physical and online cross-checking

Permission seeking (project manager)

Scanning & OCR

Uploading to repository

OPAC record creation

Permissions and licensing

Balance of openness with IP protection

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives license chosen

• 14 permissions received, 5 refusals. (And lots of non-responders and incomplete negotiations...)

Reasons for not getting permission:

1. couldn’t locate contact or couldn’t get a response

2. concerns over loss of revenue

3. publications already digitised or going to be

Ask a librarian!

Populating the Digital Library

First agreement from University of Nairobi – June 2010

Added over 700 of their publications from our holdings

Official launch - September 2011

By June 2013 had 13 more organisations on board

1900+ full-text papers

The BLDS Digital Library

http://blds.ids.ac.uk/digital-library

DSpace open source software

Searchable and browsable

Community/ collection structure

OPAC integration

Don’t scan and dump!

Bibliographic record links to full text and vice versa

Multiplies access points

Continues retrospective cataloguing work

A virtuous circle

Measuring impact 1: the numbers

Around 3000 downloads per month

Around 1500 unique site visitors per month... based in over 100 different countries

75% come via search engines

An invisible repository is a successful repository?

Measuring impact 2: demand

From supply to demand

Joining up with enquiry and document delivery services

‘On demand’ digitisation of IDS publications

Measuring impact 3: the international picture

African capacity, African repositories

National-level in Ethiopia and Malawi

Next steps

DFID funding for the Global Open Knowledge Hub

Digital Library continuing to grow

In-country digitisation

Thank you

http://blds.ids.ac.uk

http://blds.ids.ac.uk/digital-library

[email protected]

@blds_library @archelina

And thanks to Henry Rowsell and Helen Rehin

for their contributions to this paper.