African Language Material in Institutional Repositories: Visibility and Scholarly Impact

Abstract

Various international organisations such as the United Nations and the African Union recognise the value of language in development, peacebuilding and reconciliation. Language is also recognised in planning policies of countries such as South Africa where the National Development Plan of the country seeks to ensure that every citizen learns at least one African language by 2030. This paper sought to determine the availability, impact and visibility of African language material hosted by institutional repositories (IRs) at public universities in South Africa. Informetrics methods were applied using data obtained from DSpace, Google Scholar and ResearchGate to determine the impact and visibility. The most important findings were that 65.2 per cent of public university IRs had at least one African language document in their IRs. Overall, only 0.16 per cent of documents in public university IRs were in African languages. A total of 16 per cent of African language documents hosted by these IRs are in ResearchGate. This study appears to be the first to determine the visibility of African language documents hosted by IRs in South Africa in ResearchGate and their citation impact in Google. This study will add value to the literature on the role of academic libraries in preserving indigenous languages, knowledge, and culture.

Resource Repositories and linking resources: An exploratory study

“…This notion can also be alluded to by the LRRs, as more and more scholars are realising the importance of having a storage facility that can be accessed online. UNESCO's initiative to work on Indigenous languages and recognise their value is a great way to prove how valuable language is (Bangani & Moyo 2019). It is for this reason that UNESCO and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories issued a statement together in support of the development of repositories with the aim of offering freely available research outputs via repositories (Kitchen & Muttis 2016).…”

“…In Pinfield et al (2014) the growth of more specifically open access repositories between 2005-2012 is discussed. In their paper the development of repositories in Africa is described as being "comparatively low" when compared to that in certain parts of Asia, Eastern Europe and South America (Pinfield et al 2014(Pinfield et al :2415 Bangani & Moyo (2019), therefore fall outside the scope of the rest of this discussion.…”

“…Extent of African language representation in public university IRs in South Africa fromBangani &Moyo (2019) …”