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4 - An African experience in providing a digital library service: the African Virtual University (AVU) example

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2018

Pauline Ngimwa
Affiliation:
African Virtual University, Kenya
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Summary

Introduction

This paper discusses the African Virtual University (AVU)'s experience in delivering digital learning resources to students and academics in its partner institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. Although digital resources are perceived as perfect supplementary resources to the deprived traditional libraries, the AVU has had first-hand experience in the successes and challenges of exploiting these resources in an African context. The fundamental lesson learnt is that the relatively poor technology status in Africa, including limited bandwidth and inadequate ICT infrastructure critical to successful exploitation of these digital resources, tend to reduce their benefits for African higher education. This is supported by a number of studies that have been carried out in the recent past by the AVU. The studies further show the negative impact that these low bandwidth levels have had on the overall access, utilization and usefulness of the educational digital resources to the learners and academics in African universities. In addition, this has directly impacted on the level of basic information literacy in a modern electronic environment that most of the African students encounter for the first time when they join tertiary education.

The paper presents examples of the nature of the digital resources that are used by the AVU, ranging from library resources to open educational resources (OERs). The AVU, recognizing the negative impact this technological situation has had on education, has in the past three years invested in exploring alternative creative solutions. Some of these initiatives have successfully evolved to become continent-wide projects, as will be discussed later in this paper. This includes a project to expand bandwidth through VSAT (very small aperture terminal) technology deployment in the AVU's partner institutions at an affordable cost by aggregating bandwidth demand. Other examples include the use of hard disks and local servers to store and make available digital content that would otherwise require huge bandwidth if they were to be made available online, thus making it possible to easily access targeted sets of resources in ways that are both pedagogically effective and cost-effective.

The African Virtual University is a pan-African educational network established in 1997 as a World Bank project to serve the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

Type
Chapter
Information
Libraries Without Walls 7
Exploring ‘anywhere, anytime’ delivery of library services
, pp. 29 - 38
Publisher: Facet
Print publication year: 2008

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