5th African Conference for Digital Scholarship and Curation

Theme: Mapping the progress of digital scholarship and curation in Africa: measuring Africas readiness and progress

Africa is on the path of embracing new technologies, in government, academia and business. There is also significant investment in the laying of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial networks in the African data market. All this attests to the fact that Africa is making some progress towards world class digital scholarship and curation. During the 4th African Conference for digital scholarship and curation it was highlighted that technology plays a fundamental role in enabling data curation, scholarship and collaborations in building repositories of data and knowledge. However, there has been little effort to determine the hotspots of such progress on the African continent. This conference therefore is an attempt to map and showcase the progress of digital scholarship and curation initiatives and to measure the readiness of the African continent to embrace the next generation of digital researchers. 
 
Authors are invited to submit abstracts for papers linked to the main theme and subthemes of the conference. All abstracts will be peer reviewed and selected papers will be published in a high impact international refereed journal.  

Abstracts and proposals for papers, posters and workshops should be submitted before 30th November 2011.  Only documents in electronic format will be considered.  Please submit to: ssekitto@easlis.mak.ac.ug

Sub-Themes

Open Access Initiatives and Legal Policies

• Open Scholarship Initiatives in Africa
• Development of Institutional Repositories in Africa
• Legislation and open data 
• Ethical issues and personal data 
• Tensions between maintaining quality and openness 

Preservation and Digitization for Education and Learning

• Capturing and preservation of Indigenous Knowledge
• Digitization of Archeological gems in Africa
• Strategic Institutional alignments for the next generation of data preservation and curation
• UNESCO: Memory of World programmes in Africa
• Education and training of the next generation of African

Curators: Opportunities and Challenges

• eLearning collectionsInformation seeking behaviours in the digitized world
• The impact of digitization in schools in Africa
• Collaboration initiatives
• Mobile learning

Mobile Learning in the Digital Media Era

• Connectivity and its role in learning
• Mobile devices and their applications
• Mobile services
• Mobile users and their needs

Working with research data

• Data quality 
• Data citation 
• Open vs sensitive or private data  
• Using open data: examples of enablers, barriers and success stories 
• Developing new metrics for open data 
• Linked data, open data, closed data and provenance
• Scale issues in the management of sensitive data 
• Using open data: examples of enablers, barriers and success stories 
• Curation of mixed data collections, 
• Gathering evidence for benefits of data sharing for African scholars 
• Building capacity for the effective management, sharing and reuse of open data

Infrastructure

• Connectivity in Africa: Mapping the impact of regional sea cables and terrestrial backbone fibers
• Technical and organisational solutions for data security 

Conference activities

• Paper presentations
• Poster presentations
• Exhibitions
• Workshops

Paper/ Abstracts

• Paper length:                         Maximum number of words inclusive of references: 10 pages
• Abstract length:                     Maximum number of words 500 words
• Citation format:                      Harvard referencing
• Format of the paper:               Introduction (providing context of digital scholarship/curation), research problem, methodology, findings and discussion, implications, conclusions, and recommendations
• Case Studies:                          Case studies, success stories but also lessons learnt are encouraged in the papers

Key deadlines

Submission of abstracts by prospective paper presenters: 30th November 2011
Selection and acceptance of abstracts: 15 December 2011
Deadline for full paper submission by presenters: 30th January 2012
Review of papers completed: 30th March 2012
Draft programme released: early February 2012
Presentation files submitted: 1st May 2012
Submission for posters: 30th January 2012
Submission for workshops: 30th January 2012

Target audience

• Scientists and researchers
• Research managers
• Educationists
• Information scientists, librarians and other information professionals
• ICT infrastructure service providers and managers and telecommunication services
• System administrators and engineers
• System developers
• Information Technology Managers
• Graduate students
• Spatial and other data analysis
• E-space analysts 
• Technology stewards
• Archivists, records managers, curators
• Policy makers- in tertiary education, science and technology centers
• Young professionals who need gain exposure in the new work environment, and 
• Seasoned professionals wanting to remain relevant