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Dr Jane Morris, Director of the ACGT with Dr Heila Pienaar, UP Co-Leader of the SERA e-Research Enablement Focus Area Team |
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ltr - International guests Lee Dirks, Matthew Dovey & David Giaretta with CSIR Co-Leader of the e-Research Enablement Team, Martie van Deventer |
Represented by Dr Heila Pienaar of the SERA e-Research Enablement Focus Area Team, the University of Pretoria (UP) recently co-hosted the 2nd African Digital Scholarship and Curation Conference with the University of Botswana.
The main purpose of the Conference, which was held on 12 and 13 May 2009, was to identify opportunities, strategies and practical examples for new forms of research and scholarship, and for the management of the digital content of these activities by academics, researchers, scientists, information professionals and IT experts. In particular, the Conference sought to pull subject expertise and advanced computer skills, as well as information science practitioners into the same conversations.
The conference programme comprised three parallel tracks and three plenary sessions. The plenary sessions attempted to provide an international perspective while the parallel tracks concentrated on practical implementations and ongoing activities, mainly in Africa but also with perspectives from abroad. Some of the topics covered in the tracks included IT infrastructure for digital scholarship; collaboration; digital data management and curation; digital divide; intellectual property issues; and ethics and trust in the digital world - among many others.
Conference highlights included a presentation by Lee Dirks of Microsoft Research. In his paper titled "Transforming scholarly communication" he made a number of predictions with regards to the progress and trends in e-Research within the next five to ten years. Among these predictions were that open access to both text and data will be the rule, not the exception; publications will be live documents with links to (real-time) data and related software; new forms of peer review and social networking will have been accepted/adopted; National and International repositories will be a key part of the scientific cyberinfrastructure; and that a service industry will develop around online data analysis, visualization and dissemination of scientific information
Several other international speakers contributed to the sharing of learning and experience, with perhaps the most prolific being David Giaretta of the UK's Digital Curation Centre (DCC) - who delivered no fewer than three papers!
The Conference also featured significant contributions from Africa, with several researchers from both the CSIR and UP making presentations - especially within the eResearch track. Papers varied from digitizing knowledge regarding the processing of indigenous fruit, to investigating the need for a virtual research environment amongst researchers of malaria, to intelligent transport systems and cloud computing. The fact that e-Research/ e-Scholarship had progressed as far as it had in a period of approximately 18 months since the first Conference, emphasised the dire need to also get the related curation activities up to speed.
A paper on Botswana's progress with regard to e-Learning was well received while a paper relating initiatives to introduce science and technology to toddlers attracted much attention. The next stage of development would be to transfer some of the learning content to mobile technology - a solution to several obstacles within the African context. Similarly, papers on the use of wikis, 'gaming' and virtual worlds to perform information literacy training were well received and much discussed.
Another paper that caused much deliberation was one in which the authors made use of 'worldmapper' images to display Africa's contribution to the published body of research literature (showing a very thin and small Africa) versus the image of a large, obese Africa when it comes to issues such as poverty and illiteracy. The reality of an Africa where cutting edge basic science including cell biology, immunology, biochemistry, genetics, microbiology and molecular science is conducted - which in turn enables us to discover the origin and development of disease - was stressed. A serious plea was made that Africans actively participate in the effort to find alternative publishing models that would reward research effort much earlier in the research cycle.
In addition, the SERA e-Research Enablement Focus Area Team hosted an e-Research seminar for senior researchers of both the CSIR and UP on 11 May. Facilitated by the CSIR's Awie Vlok, the seminar has laid the foundation for further eResearch enablement framework development. The seminar specifically aimed to extract lessons learnt by overseas players active in the field of e-Research and to dovetail the learning with local agendas with the view of using these as input considerations for the review and mobilisation of a South African e-Research blueprint. Delegates agreed that the immediate and primary focus will have to be on the inclusive development of a strategic framework with a five- to ten-year horizon, and to have this adequately funded, resourced and governed to serve the South African research community with the technology backbone and service for effective and efficient linkages to similar users and providers, both locally and abroad. Facilitating such a development process will definitely be a primary focus area for the e-Research Enablement Team in the foreseeable future.
All Conference papers and several presentations have been made available via the conference web site. View the Conference proceedings. Several papers have also been selected to be included and published as a special edition of The Electronic Library. The journal edition will be published early in 2010.
The 2nd African Digital Scholarship and Curation Conference was a follow-up to two conferences that were held independently in 2007 and 2008 - the University of Botswana's Digital Scholarship Conference in December 2007, Gaborone, and the 1st African Digital Curation Conference in February 2008, Pretoria. The next conference will be in May 2010 in Gaborone, Botswana.
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