THE African Association of African Union annual Database of African Thesis and Dissertation (DATAD) conference opened in Bulawayo yesterday amid calls for institutions of higher learning to register their repositories and digital collections.
BY TALENT GUMPO
Addressing delegates at the opening ceremony, Lupane State University vice-chancellor Pardon Kusaziva Kuipa said the repositories provided access to information on online platforms.
“Institutional repository systems must be able to support interoperability in order to provide access via multiple search engines and other discovery,” Kuipa said.
He said the programme sought to encourage African universities to register their collections to allow for researchers to access their content.
“This lowers the barriers to repository operation for many institutions, as it only requires a file system to hold the content and the ability to create and share metadata with external systems. The networked open access repositories lower access barriers and offer the widest possible dissemination of a scholar’s work”, he said.
The conference is being attended by university representatives from South Africa, Ghana, Botswana and Zimbabwe, among other countries.
