West African Digital Library Best Practices Digital libraries and archives are being created around the globe. Educational institutions, publishers, corporations, governments, librarians, archivists, museum curators, and individual collectors are all trying to find ways to use digital media to help preserve, store, catalogue, disseminate, and share their materials. However, computer, Internet, and digital technologies change too rapidly and institutions have too many varying needs and resources for a single set of standards.
Nations also have differing visions and laws.
While the promise of the new technologies is to help people around the world to share resources and knowledge, digitizing projects must respect the rights of individuals, cultures and nations who own the materials. The African Digital Library Project in particular poses interesting practical and research questions about collaborating on international digital information systems in a cross-cultural context. The African Digital Library Project will seek to create and identify those best practices that will support the effective development, interchange, persistence, and assessment of digital repository collections and services. This work will be an ongoing part of our research and thus this page will be updated regularly and will seek input from the various institutions and individuals involved the project. The OAI is an international initiative to develop a technical framework for the effective dissemination and interchange of content among digital repositories.