 October 2006 was an important month in South Africa. We like to celebrate things here at the tip of Africa, and what better occasion to celebrate than the 75th birthday of one of our most famous leaders, Archbishop Desmond Tutu?
The Arch, as he's fondly known, was a major figure in South Africa's liberation struggle, and is a well-respected statesman and religious leader all over the world. Oh, and he won a Nobel Peace Prize. He's a mover.
And all movers are online. Which is why a new project, launched earlier this month, is so exciting.
The Desmond Tutu Digital Archive project is a complete archive of all of the Arch's personal papers and recordings, which will, ultimately, be available, free of change, online for students, journalists, theologians and others. The fully interactive archive will be accessible to people of all cultures, all ages and all levels of learning and experience, not only in South Africa but also all over the world.
The Archive is a joint project between the Centre for Computing In The Humanities at King's College London (where Tutu is an alumnus) The University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where a large amount of archived material about the Archbishop is housed.
The Archive is going to be developed as a multi-media 'virtual' resource, containing well over 200 000 pages and 100 hours of audio, sourced from various archives in South Africa. This content is currently being digitised. Other content, from other sources, which is not part of the archive will be catalogued, so that researchers can consult a detailed index of material all over the world, whether it is part of the archive or not.
The project will also provide training for archivists and librarians who need to develop their digital skills, and enable them to share the skills and knowledge through workshops and other forms of formal and informal training.
While no mention has been made of how the content of the archive will be licensed, according to the project proposal, the technical architecture of the archive will 'â?¦be based on the most robust international standards using open source software. Any tools developed by the project will themselves be available under an open source licence.'
An editorial and advisory board, based in South Africa and made up of archivists, and academics will also be set up to examine how the intellectual architecture of the archive and access are to be managed. Naturally, some form of CC licence would make the most sense; perhaps this is the first chance for am indigenous knowledge licence to be put into practice?
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