Connecting-Africa
 
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About Connecting-Africa

Connecting-Africa (C-A) is a service that provides access to African research information produced worldwide.

The service provides:

  • titles of published research on Africa;
  • digital resources on Africa (full-text of publications, images and sound) in almost 90 institutional repositories. Connecting-Africa provides access to these digital resources by "harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and by filtering the metadata using its Post Harvest Analyzer.
The former Experts and Organisations databases have been removed, since they were rarely used.
There is no charge for using the service.


Publishers & copyright
Connecting-Africa has put together some information on publishers & copyright issues.

Connecting-Africa

History and background information
Connecting-Africa was started in 2006 by the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) in the Netherlands, aiming to make all worldwide Africanist research material accessible through one community portal on the Internet.

By providing federated access to university repositories and other resources, and by gathering knowledge and expertise that are both physically and electronically scattered across universities and research centres, it is hoped to offer fertile ground for a more effective knowledge exchange.

The goals of Connecting-Africa are in accordance with the ASCL's mission of fostering scholarly communication in the field of African Studies.


Netherlands African Studies Association (NVAS)
Connecting-Africa is supported by the Netherlands African Studies Association (NVAS). The NVAS was set up in 1997 to provide a scientific forum for Africanists working in the Netherlands. It aims to promote and coordinate the study of the social sciences on Africa by maintaining close links with universities and research institutes.


Maintenance
The African Studies Centre Leiden, facilitates Connecting-Africa by providing technical maintenance. Staff of the ASCL Library, Information and Documentation Department are responsible for the evaluation and selection of digital resources for inclusion in Connecting-Africa. This is an ongoing process, and new records are added each month.
The ASCL is part of Leiden University, the Netherlands.


Sponsors
The development of Connecting-Africa has been made possible by funding from:
- the Dutch SURF Foundation, as part of the former DARE Programme (Digital Academic REpositories);
- the Development Policy Review Netwerk (DPRN), jointly developed Global Connections based on Connecting-Africa. Both DPRN and Global Connections stopped in January 2012 due to lack of funding.

The African Studies Centre Leiden hosts, develops and operates the service. It welcomes partner organisations with an interest to support this virtual community activity for African Studies. Please contact us if you would want to become a sponsor of Connecting-Africa.


Cookies
This website does not use cookies. Connecting-Africa logs activity at the webserver itself. It does not use this data to track individual visitors, but to gain a general impression of the number of visitors to the website, the pages most frequently visited, the kind of search requests, etc. With this information we are then able to make improvements to our website.

ASCL

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