Uganda Scholarly Digital Library (USDL) Makerere University’s Institutional Repository By Margaret Nakiganda URL: Contact:

Introduction  USDL is the official institutional repository of Makerere University that is offering the following services to its community: collection, storage, preservation (in digital format) and retrieval of items submitted to USDL.  It is used for the management and dissemination of digital research output created by the institution and its community

Introduction cont’d  USDL uses the DSpace technology, (a software developed at MIT with support from Hewlett Packard) which complies with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI); thus allowing articles to be easily discovered by web search engines, services and indexing tools.

Types of materials archived in USDL  Research articles (preprints and postprints)  Conference papers and reports  Workshop reports  Technical reports and Working papers  Sound files (for the music collection)  Final Thesis and Dissertations

USDL Content Submissions  All researchers can submit content into USDL however, they have to request for submission rights in the DSpace system through the USDL Team in the Library.  Faculty Librarians help in the collection of publications from Researchers for conversion and inclusion in the system

Copyright Issues in USDL  For items already published elsewhere, publisher policies are used on self- archiving in institutional repositories. These are provided at  For publishers not yet listed in the above site, the Institution requests for self- archiving permissions from the individual journal publishers.

Copyright issues cont’d  All content owners are required to sign consent agreements with the institution, allowing it to archive their works.  When an item is submitted to USDL, the submitter grants a license, thereby confirming that the item submitted complies with all copyright requirements.

Challenges  The Library collection of theses and dissertations is only available in print format. Once a researcher consents to depositing a thesis into the repository, it has to go through the tedious digital conversion process.  Most publishers only allow self-archiving of the author’s version of the article, which is difficult to find especially when there is a time lag between the publication date and the time a request is made for self-archiving.  These two major challenges make the process of content collection & submission very slow.

THE END  THANK YOU