1. Under construction: Connecting-Africa African studies community portal for research and higher education July 2005 Titia van der Werf Afrika-Studiecentrum Leiden, NL

2. PROJECT DARC Distributed Africana Repositories Community Funding: SURF Foundation 1 st Tender 2003:€ 46.800 2 nd Tender 2004: € 140.000 Partners: Afrika-Studiecentrum Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences University of Amsterdam University of Groningen University of Leiden University of Wageningen

3. Focus: Research in the Netherlands Aim: Strengthen African Studies in the Netherlands: more unity and visibility on the web Improve access to Dutch research material via the Internet Foster exchanges and co-operation in Dutch research and higher education

4. Approach: By developing jointly a service to the benefit of all participants Based on existing building blocs Database of Africanists in the Netherlands Embedded in national infrastructures DAREDARE (Digital Academic Repositories) NODNOD (Dutch Research Database)

5. Connecting Africa DAREnet Search Subject Gateway H H H IR ORG IMPLEMENTATION MODEL DARE

6. IMPLEMENTATION MODEL DARC Input module IR University Library Dutch Research Database DARC Harvester Request info Connecting-Africa African Studies Portal University- department

15. Core community 350 Africanists in the Netherlands 110 university units and research schools Interested parties Dutch academics doing research on Africa Africanists from elsewhere; policy-makers; NGO staff; journalists; etc. Content metadata records ( approx. 2000) with links to full-text publications (approx. 300) digitised publications of the ASC (approx.100)

16. Repositories harvested: SiteRecords University Leiden: 1941 University Groningen: 3565 University of Amsterdam: 15474 Wageningen University: 103227 Total of 124245 records harvested Records filtered: Approx.300 records filtered with list of African country and regions names (excl. Wageningen)

17. Software development 1. OAI Harvest Manager Based on open source software Enhanced with a scheduler and other functionalities Available as open source software 2. OAI Harvest Analyser Developed from scratch Matches harvested records with controlled vocabularies Filtering mechanism based on weighted results Will be made available as open source software

24. AFRICAN STUDIES are not restricted to the Netherlands … we also harvested the repository of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (SOAS) see title 25 on next sheet …

28. AFRICAN STUDIES distributed community interdisciplinary niche research area Strong starting points for developing virtual community pulling in Africa-related research achieving cross-sectoral synergies

29. FUTURE of CONNECTING-AFRICA cover African Studies in the Netherlands harvest other OAI repositories containing African Studies material encourage colleagues in Europe to deposit material in OAI compliant repositories encourage African colleague research institutions to set up OAI compliant repositories (harvest content from Africa) enlarge the community with specialists on Africa from NGO’s, the media, governments, etc.

30. Connecting African Studies Globally !