University of Cape Coast UCC digital library
Perhaps the most impressive example of a digital library in Ghana is at the University of Cape Coast Library. Funded by a World Bank grant, this digital library is intended to support the information needs of approximately 23,000 distance education students completing coursework at study centers located in each of the country’s ten administrative regions. The objective of this project is to provide students with online access to locally produced scholarly materials. Initiated in 2005, the project has made substantial progress toward digitizing a variety of university publications, including departmental journals, conference proceedings, speeches, and university bulletins, as well as teaching materials, such as faculty lecture notes and course syllabi. Additionally, all theses and dissertations at UCC have been digitized.
While this is an excellent example of how locally produced knowledge can be harnessed to improve education, it is important to point out that these materials will not be openly accessible to users outside the university system. Registered students and faculty members will be able to login with their university username and password, but others will be required to purchase materials on a pay per download model (similar to databases like Emerald). This raises interesting issues regarding the trend of the commoditization of information in Africa; or at least the perception among African librarians that Westerners should pay for access to their digitized content.
In particular, there were two things that stood out if considering about the UCC digital library. First, the librarians were greatly committed to using open source software. Open source offers African libraries a number of advantages in terms of quality, flexibility, and cost efficiency. With open source, libraries can modify their software and implement special features that meet the needs of particular communities (particularly in terms of linguistic differences). Further, libraries in the developing world often do not have the financial resources to purchase proprietary software, which is costly and must be upgraded periodically. Secondly, while I was visiting the UCC library, I observed a number of training sessions in which librarians from other parts of Ghana as well as abroad were learning about the digitization process. It was encouraging to see that UCC librarians were eager to serve as a regional model in terms of sharing their experiences with other libraries in order to help them create their own digital libraries.