Best Practice Presentation: Low Resource Metadata/Data Repositories

Title: Low Resource Metadata/Data Repositories
Date: 2020-09-24 15:00
Slides: slides.pdf
Recording: Watch on YouTube



	Hussein Suleman
Hussein Suleman
School of IT, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Hussein's research is situated within the Digital Libraries Laboratoryand the Centre in ICT for Development (ICT4D). His main researchinterests are in digital libraries, ICT4D, African language InformationRetrieval, cultural heritage preservation, Internet technology andeducational technology. He has in the past worked extensively onarchitecture, scalability and interoperability issues related to digitallibrary systems. He has worked closely with international and nationalpartnerships for metadata archiving, including: the Open ArchivesInitiative; Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations; andthe NRF-CHELSA South African National ETD Project. His recent researchhas a growing emphasis on the relationship between low resourceenvironments and such architectures. This has evolved into a focus onsocietal development and its alignment with digital libraries andinformation retrieval. He is currently collaborating with colleagues inarchiving and curation to develop a proof-of-concept low-resourcesoftware toolkit for robust long-term archiving.

Abstract
Many poor countries are unable to maintain metadata/data repositories for a variety of archival needs. Funding and skills constraints have a substantial impact, resulting in short-lived projects in the best case and non-starters in the worst case. In contrast, some of the more successful projects have avoided popular solutions in favour of simple and low-resource alternatives. This talk will present one approach currently being pursued to develop systems and workflows that closely match the needs of unskilled users without funding and will arguably result in simple preservation.