Conceptions of digital libraries: an African perspective

Abstract

<jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title> <jats:p>The purpose of this paper was to explore African conceptions of digital libraries from the perspective of the historical literature. This paper argues that the concept of digital libraries is a western creation and that there was a need for developing societies to develop their own conceptions to guide their own digital library development agenda.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title> <jats:p>The paper is based on a literature review. The paper makes use of publicly-available literature on the theme of digital libraries from both the Western and African perspectives. The search terms used were “digital libraries”, “Africa digital libraries”, “electronic libraries”, “information communication technologies/libraries” and “institutional repositories”. A total of 89 publications were examined for this purpose.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title> <jats:p>The analysis revealed that most of the initial digital library initiatives in Africa emanated from the west with African countries benefiting from international initiatives to expand access to information resources to bridge the global digital divide. However, due to a number of contextual challenges such as lack of sustainable funding and inadequate capacity and strategy, the development of digital libraries was hampered. Thus, even though digital libraries enjoy considerable goodwill, there remain negative conceptions of digital libraries in Africa.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Practical implications</jats:title> <jats:p>Information institutions in African countries must evolve a unified conception of digital libraries as this would largely drive the direction of digital library development towards achieving the developmental goals of the continent.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title> <jats:p>The study applies the attributes of innovation to explain contextual factors shaping African conceptions of digital libraries.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Harnessing digital power for relevance: status of digital transformation in selected university libraries in Uganda

“…Barriers hindering digital transformation in university libraries in Uganda Most participating librarians indicated that inadequate funding hindered digital transformation in their libraries, which suggested that the surveyed university libraries in Uganda were not adequately funded. The issue of limited funding in university libraries has also been reported in several previous studies, which indicated that lack of funding hindered the implementation of IRs (Buwule and Mutula, 2019;Dlamini and Snyman, 2017;Kodua-Ntim and Fombad, 2020;Owusu-Ansah, 2020), ILMS (Aregbesola et al, 2019;Buwule and Ponelis, 2017;Komolafe-Opadeji and Ojo, 2019), IoT (W ojcik, 2016) and 4IR technologies (Acheampong and Dei, 2020). The ongoing financial difficulties faced by libraries have hampered their ability to acquire technological and information resources (Jain and Akakandelwa, 2016).…”