1. eIFL: Towards the federation of repositories S Veldsman eIFL Content Manager

2. Overview of presentation eIFL Background What have we done so far? Federated repository portal Few challenges

3. eIFL Background electronic Information For Libraries (eIFL) Established in 1999, registered in 2003 Funded by the Open Society Institute, and other funders Registered in the Netherlands as a non-for-profit organisation, operational seat based in Rome This global network embraces nearly 2200 libraries, 50 countries in developing world, and millions of users in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Ultimate vision: “Access to knowledge”

4. eIFL Programmes Negotiation of e-resources with publishers Library consortium building and development Advocacy for and capacity building in copyright Open Access awareness raising and advocacy Advocacy for and implementation of Open Source Software in libraries Knowledge sharing

5. What have we done so far? Advocacy and Training in OA and IR issues: – China, Syria, Bulgaria, Lithuania – Ghana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe – South Africa : 2004, 2005 qnd 2006 – Carnegie Research Library Consortium(South Africa)2007 Hands-on-training in how to set up IR’s – South Africa (all institutions) Digital library training-hands-on – Greenstone: Namibia, Lesotho, Malawi, Zimbabwe - Conferences:OAI5, SARUA Growing IRs in eIFL member countries: – 2006: 64 (25 in progress) – 2007:96 (27 in progress)

6. Country Number of repositories within the countries Azerbaijan1 Belarus6 Bulgaria2 China12 Estonia3 Jordan1 Kyrgystan1 Latvia1 Lithuania1 Mongolia2 Namibia 1 Poland23 Russia7 South Africa 10 Senegal1 Serbia6 Slovenia2 Uganda2 Ukraine9 Zimbabwe1 Total institutional repositories96

7. What have we done so far?(2) Create more visibility – OAIster 2006:16 2007:30 – OpenDoar 2006:21 2007:38 – Google – Federating repositories?

8. How did eIFL do it? SURF/CQ2- Driver 15 countries, 59 repositories 80 343 items retrieved Sahara (Open Source Harvester) Lucene( Open Source Indexer) Existing DRIVER platform and software Pilot project

9. Where can it be find? http://eifl.cq2.org

15. Statistics so far: Nov 2007-Jan 2008 Usage – No of visits: 480 – Pages:1450 – Hits: 5064 Countries – USA, SA, Kenya, Botswana, Australia, Europe Bots: – MSN,Google and Yahoo Hosts, connecting sites

16. What problems did we incur when harvesting? Base URLs Not OAI-PMH compliant Contacts on institutional level Lack of knowledge

17. Objectives of initiative Tool/demonstrator infrastructure for countries visibility of scholarly publications in the developing world trans -national co-operation and community building raising the awareness on the importance of standards, adding of full text within repositories and training possible participation and co-operation opportunities in international projects e.g. DRIVER motivation to countries to set up repositories (encourage competition)

18. What are the challenges? further increase visibility of repositories (move from repository to portal level) refining of regional subsets To set up more IRs within eIFL countries Human resources (capacity) and knowledge Bandwidth, availability of computers, connectivity How to identify champs? IR’s are not just about e-thesis and dissertations, move beyond it

19. What are the challenges(2 ) set up of standards and guidelines to ensure high quality metadata for international harvesting purposes how to make current IRs OAI-PMH compliant Training, training, training! Move from country coordinator level to institutional level Look for partnerships

20. Decisions on the way forward Board meeting-next week – Maintain service as is,provision of funding to maintain, develop and host of portal – Deeper level of service provision, explore technical possibilities e.g. more search functionality, OAI-PMH base URL assigned to portal,

21. What can eIFL offer? Best practices Collaboration Communities of developing countries Contacts Information on developing countries Experiences

22. Thank you! Susan.veldsman@eifl.net