Africa Reportedly Contributes Less Than 1% of Global Research Output. How Can Repositories Help?
Channel: Lighton Phiri
Date: 2021-05-10

Lighton Phiri gave a talk titled "Effective Ingestion of Digital Objects in Institutional Repositories Using Subject Repositories" during the IST-Africa 2021 Online Conference [1], held between May 10-14, 2021. 

This talk is based on a peer-reviewed article published in the IST-Africa 2021 Conference Proceedings [2] and is linked to research conducted as part of a final year undergraduate capstone project [3]. The presentation slides [4] and peer-reviewed article [5] are both publicly available.

## Video Timeline
00:00:00 Personal Introduction
00:00:46 About DataLab Research Group
00:01:29 Research Motivation
00:04:08 Problem Statement: Prior Research
00:06:10 Problem Statement: Study Focus
00:07:54 Research Objectives and Contributions
00:09:08 Research Approach/Methodology
00:10:56 Major Outcomes/Results
00:12:56 Conclusions and Outlook
00:14:33 Biblography
00:14:43 Closing

## Title
Effective Ingestion of Digital Objects in Institutional Repositories Using Subject Repositories

## Abstract
The online visibility of scholarly research output from the Global South is cited as being low. This is despite the increased number of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) setting up institutional Repositories (IR), to facilitate the collection, long-term preservation and effective access to scholarly research output. One of the most common challenges faced by HEIs is ensuring regular ingestion of digital objects in IRs. In order to address this challenge, we propose the use of subject IRs by HEIs in order to facilitate the increased online visibility of scholarly research output. This paper outlines a case study conducted at The University of Zambia (UNZA), in order to demonstrate the feasibility of using subject IR at relatively large HEIs. A situational analysis was conducted to determine the relative effectiveness of ingesting digital objects at UNZA, and additionally, a subject repository was implemented in order to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing subject repositories. The results suggest that it is feasible to implement usable subject repositories, presenting opportunities to decentralise the ingestion of digital objects at large HEIs. This has the obvious benefit of facilitating effective self-archiving of digital objects and the subsequent increased online visibility of scholarly research output.

## Biography
Lighton Phiri is a Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Library and Information Science at the University of Zambia [6], where he is a member of the DataLab research group [7]. His broad research interests lie within the areas of Data Mining, Digital Libraries and Technology-Enhanced Learning. He is currently a member of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) "Enhancement of the Union Catalog" Working Group [8] and also sits on the Association of Computing Machinery SIGIR/SIGKDD AFIRM steering committee [9]. 

## Bibliography
[1] http://www.ist-africa.org
[2] http://www.ist-africa.org/Conference2020/default.asp?page=paper-repository
[3] http://datalab.unza.zm/publications/26
[4] https://www.slideshare.net/lightonphiri/effective-ingestion-of-digital-objects-in-institutional-repositories-using-subject-repositories
[5] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rU_HCgcSDX2VyWO28Ta0xp8kLCidZhBc/view?usp=sharing
[6] https://www.unza.zm
[7] http://datalab.unza.zm
[8] http://www.ndltd.org/a/ndltd.org/ndltd/directory/committees-and-working-groups/enhancement-of-the-union-catalog
[9] http://sigir.org/afirm2020

#DigitalLibraries
#GlobalSouth
#InstitutionalRepositories