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
@blds_library @archelina
And thanks to Henry Rowsell and Helen Rehin
for their contributions to this paper.
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