Sabinet Gateway, an organisation promoting and supporting library and information services in Africa, has chosen OCLC's CONTENTdm Digital Collection Management Software to store, manage and make available an African Online Journal Archive.
For Sabinet, managing the project on behalf of Sabinet Gateway, the choice of a system to manage and distribute digital content was possibly more difficult than for most libraries or cultural institutions.
As an active services provider in the libraries and information field, Sabinet is an expert on what is on the market and what to look for. Due to that background, the requirements that Sabinet had were certainly very severe. But after considering the advantages of other options, such as open source software, and after evaluating against other systems, Sabinet could not but decide to go for CONTENTdm.
"We definitely wanted a solution that uses current technology," says Rosalind Hattingh, Director of Product Management at Sabinet. "Other options we looked at could not deliver the scalability that CONTENTdm offers, nor did they have the international support and the standards-based architecture that are essential to us. And last, but not least, CONTENTdm's broad international customer base also played an important role in our decision."
The African Online Journal Archive that Sabinet will manage with CONTENTdm is a project to make academic inputs from all over Africa available for research purposes to local and international organisations and academic institutions. It will create a central full-text repository of retrospective journal content that contains important African research across a number of fields. About 250 journals from English-speaking African countries will be included. "In all, we expect the archive will contain approximately 90 000 articles," says Rosalind Hattingh. The project is primarily funded by a grant from Carnegie Corporation to Sabinet Gateway, the not-for-profit organisation promoting and supporting library and information services in Africa.
CONTENTdm software offers a complete set of tools to store, manage and deliver digital collections such as historical documents, photos, newspapers, audio and video on the Web. It is used by hundreds of institutions worldwide to manage thousands of digital collections.
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