Speaker
Description
Sub-Theme: Applications and Services (Cloud Services and Collaboration Tools, Trust and Identity, Cybersecurity)
Abstract:
National Repository to bring Researchers’ Work into Spotlight: The Ethiopian Attempt as an example to Link Universities and Research Centers with the National Repository
The Ethiopian Ministry of Education is introducing institutional repositories at all universities and is supporting the National Academic Digital Repository (NADRE) as an aggregated repository. New challenges are overwhelming universities’ IT experts on one side. On the other side NADRE will provide effective access to scientific data and information in Ethiopia at a standard as it is expected from any country in the Western world. Universities build on their close cooperation with the Ethiopian Research and Education Research Network (EthERNet) and working locally with teams of IT experts and librarians to master these challenges.
In a first step, there are five universities piloting the implementation of NADRE at the front line. Others will follow soon. Lessons from European countries have been learned. The Key is to establish effective mechanisms to reduce barriers, promote production, allow access, and use digital scientific information. Models such as open-source software, federated open data networks, open-access journals, and collaborative Web sites are becoming increasingly accepted in academia around the globe.
This paper is built on the hypotheses that a national repository the center has to offer its researchers, lecturers and students in order to bring them closest to the latest information and trends in academia-worldwide. In the common understanding repositories are considered as the platform to accommodate digital research center platforms as a distributed digital library consists of material on separate machines connected via a network.
The challenge of managing information is about the decision on how to store information and how users will get connected, how they will be allowed to search, and retrieve material. Methods such as the distributed library, which hides the actual server architecture by allowing the user to interact with whichever library node is nearest to them are discussed among the experts. The users have a different set of topics to discuss, such as access to data and information required for their research or how to store data that it will be available as long as it is needed or even forever. This paper highlights to enable people to access institutional repositories by exploring the architecture of the infrastructure, bringing research works to the repository, using stored data as well as the general requirements necessary for researchers, lecturers and students to take advantage of the data and information on the repository. It also will explore, how to bring the authors into position that they become active and independent users in all processes a repository offers- user, creator and curator of data.
This paper also will share lessons learnt in Ethiopia in the phase of setting up NADRE at university level and making NADRE available to researchers, lecturers and students.
