About the Center

Mission | Objectives | Working Group

Mission

The Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies is a "virtual" space of scholarly electronic resources in text, multimedia, and interactive format to support students and faculty at the University of Iowa and scholars nationally and internationally.

Objectives 

Building Global Information Communities:
The University of Iowa Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies

Barbara I. Dewey, Afeworki Paulos, Michael Levine-Clark, Toby Lyles, Rijn Templeton

University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa

Abstract

This paper provides a case study of the issues and lessons learned regarding development of the University of Iowa's Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies (CERAS). The Center is a "virtual" space of scholarly electronic resources in text, multimedia, and interactive format and a "virtual" place for further development of electronic resources (textual and multimedia-based) pertaining to Africa created by scholars from the U.S., as well as from Africa and other parts of the world. Presenters will focus on structural, technical, and operational aspects of the Center's development within the context of collaborative cross-disciplinary partnerships. As part of the University Libraries' Scholarly Digital Resources Center, the Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies is planned as a "virtual" space for creating, disseminating, and accessing scholarly electronic resources in text, multimedia, and interactive format to support students and faculty at the University of Iowa, and scholars nationally and internationally. The Center is also a venue for U.S. and African scholars for creating and disseminating African Studies scholarship and information resources in electronic format.

CERAS Goals

The Center has several major goals including bringing together high quality African Studies scholarly electronic collections and web sites currently in existence into a user friendly digital library web page, providing a venue for "publishing" original materials, including pre-prints, (articles, books, conference proceedings) as well as creating significant thematic textual and multimedia collections of materials in electronic format, and developing an electronic international community of Africana scholars where dialogue about issues, research, and projects can take place. This feature is intended to provide a broader opportunity for Africana scholars to post drafts of research papers and projects for critique and discussion by other Africanists from around the world. CERAS will also serve as a venue for digitizing projects related to Africana scholarship (i.e. museum collections, selected non-copyrighted collections, archival materials, and documents).

The Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies site does not seek to be an exhaustive site or a gateway to all information on African Studies on the Internet and complements other initiatives such as H-Net/Africa, the African Studies Association web site and similar resources. Rather, we wish to provide a venue for the University of Iowa community to publish electronic works about African studies for wide distribution. We then want to extend an invitation to a larger community of Africana scholars and readers who will benefit from this form of publication and discourse. Bringing together this international community will also allow highly regarded Africana scholars to mentor those who wish to publish in this field. The discussion forums and log of the threads will serve as a searchable archive of their efforts.

Building on Strengths: University of Iowa Libraries and African Studies

The Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies builds on important strengths of the University. The University Libraries Information Arcade, winner of the 1994 American Library Association Library of the Future Award, has a proven track record for supporting the development and use of electronic resources in research, teaching, and independent learning. Rich in staff expertise pertaining to multimedia networked resources, the Information Arcade is a unique ground-breaking facility where librarians in partnership with faculty collect, create and provide access to electronic and print sources for teaching and research. The Arcade, along with the Information Commons, a similar facility located in the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, provides excellent support for the Center.

Through these facilities, and, in collaboration with selected faculty, the University Libraries is already providing access to electronic multimedia resources and texts, as well as serving as a research and development site for such projects as electronic journal production and innovative web resource development.

CERAS Administration

The Center is part of the Scholarly Digital Resources Center (SDRC) established by the University of Iowa Libraries to foster the creation and use of digitized collections and resources of interest to the University of Iowa community. The SDRC is a Libraries-wide initiative with many of its projects in partnership with faculty from a wide range of disciplines. Activities of the SDRC include acquisition of digital collections, electronic publishing projects, digitizing unique research materials, and providing access to digital collections located in other institutions. The SDRC is also a resource for faculty and students interested in electronic publishing, or who wish to explore issues related to electronic scholarly communication. The Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies is one of several focused initiatives of the SDRC.

The Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies is currently managed by a working group consisting of Afeworki Paulos, International Studies and Political Science Bibliographer; Steve Ostrem, International Documents Librarian; and Rijn Templeton, Art Librarian. The working group will work closely with faculty of the African Studies Program and International Programs.

Effective Ways of Federating African Studies Information

CERAS builds on developments previously begun by the UI Libraries and other departments related to African Studies, including:

The next step in CERAS advancement was to determine interest and garner project ideas from the UI African Studies faculty. To this end a graduate student was hired with an academic background in African Studies to conduct interviews. In the initial phase 27 faculty from 20 departments representing a wide variety of disciplines were interviewed. Results of the survey provided impetus for a number of projects (a few examples are noted below) and pointed to the desirability of developing a federated model for electronic African Studies resources and projects.

CERAS includes a number of original publications from the University of Iowa community. These include Baobab: A Publication Dedicated to the Study of African Expressive Culture, containing proceedings of UI graduate student symposia in African art and culture. This is the electronic version of the proceedings of the Graduate Student Symposia on African Art at the University of Iowa. The Baobab pages will house an HTML version of the publication as well as PDF files that can be accessed using Acrobat Reader. The PDF files will be searchable, providing advanced search functions for scholars. The Center will continue to publish these proceedings. The Center also published the papers of the third Stanley Conference of the University of Iowa's School of Art and Art History: "The Artist and the Workshop in Traditional Africa." Six scholars of African art presented papers and students and scholars from both coasts, Europe, and Africa attended and participated in discussion. Abstracts, papers and art from the publication are included in the electronic version.

 Forging Special Links: The African Peace Information Locator (APIL)

The African Peace Information Locator (APIL) is the first of many planned subject-oriented modules to be part of CERAS. Currently in development, the Locator will eventually provide access to digital and traditional media related to the study of African peace and conflict resolution. Briefly discussed here are decisions that have gone into the development and implementation of APIL, explaining the reasons for its creation, its intended uses, and the way it will fit into CERAS as a whole. The African Peace Information Locator, a major part of the Center, provides a model for developing "locators" for other topics in African studies.

The African Peace Information Locator complements campus, national, and global efforts to provide digital access to information on peace issues and conflict resolution with links to relevant projects developed elsewhere. Conceived as web-based, APIL contains links to information on African peace and conflict resolution at all levels of complexity and in all formats. A search engine will be developed to allow for efficient subject searching, and a computer-assisted tutorial to explain its use for individuals and classes will be included. Thus it can serve the advanced researcher as well as the more inexperienced and its technical framework can be duplicated for other "locators."

A major goal of the Center is the provision of unique information. This will entail identification and digitization of materials at the University of Iowa and elsewhere. Once this has been done, these resources will be made available through the Locator.

In addition to the usual links to Internet sites, the Locator will have information on unique resources in the University of Iowa Libraries, at African universities, and throughout the world. For example, it might point to an archive in Dar es Salaam or to a single manuscript at the University of Iowa. In this regard, we have taken inspiration from the U.S. Government Information Locator Service (GILS), a database that similarly links to information in all formats.

The initial version of the Locator provides some indication of what we hope to accomplish. This version is intended to allow a test for the structure of the final project. The ultimate organization will be based on the discovery of appropriate materials and links. As the site stands currently, there is both a topical and regional organization. Users can locate information based on a subject (arms control, peace-keeping missions, refugees, humans rights, or development) or an area (by country or regional IGO).

In many ways, the African Peace Information Locator, as conceived, will be a unique resource. The provision of subject information in all formats—digital and traditional—from one Web site has thus far not been widely attempted, but should represent the future of Internet organization. In presenting what is still a work in progress, we hope to gather input to aid in our development efforts while sharing a valuable way of conceptualizing electronic information.

 African Studies Scholarship as Image

Not simply nice illustrations or just pretty pictures, images are an essential element in developing an understanding of African art and culture and thus will be a major focus of CERAS. For example, to fully comprehend the difference between the initiation masks of the BaYaka and BaSuku from Southwestern Zaire or the regional differences of Shona headrests, it is necessary to see the objects being discussed. To that end, images are (or will be) readily accessible in projects such as the digitized Baobab publication mentioned earlier and the Iowa Studies in African Art conference proceedings.

As part of CERAS' integration into the university courses made possible because of the University of Iowa's strength in multimedia resources development and curricular integration, resources such as Professor William Dewey's Arts of Central Africa course web site, which includes the course syllabus, resources and an index of approximately 250 images, play an important part in image development of CERAS. Designed for study purposes, the course images were put up in 150 dpi (dots per inch) to allow reasonably high resolution and fill rate. Images are briefly described, such as "Kuba: helmut mask known as Bwoom. Wood, copper, pearls." Because of copyright limitations, only students of the course can view these images, but strategies for web image production were successfully developed via this project. Any interested reader can view other aspects of the website.

Links to other University of Iowa projects where images play an important role include Art and Life in Africa Online. Developed by Professor Christopher Roy and Dr. Linda McIntyre before CERAS began, Art and Life in Africa Online is adapted from the CD-ROM project of the same name. Divided into ten chapters focusing on the key moments of life, with bibliographies, maps, and many images, this site recontextualizes African art and life. The Art and Life in Africa Online web pages serve as an introduction and guide to the related CD-ROM project. They also provide online resources such as the searchable catalog of the Stanley Collection of Africa Art, an abbreviated version of the Peoples and Countries databases, and the fully-interactive chapter overview of Art and Life in Africa: Key Moments in Life. This site also provides links to related museums, museum exhibitions, and African Studies centers.

CERAS provides links to image-rich sites such as the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the National Museum of African Art, and Museum Africa. Links are also provided to clearinghouse sites such as Stanford's Africa-Art. Plans are underway to experiment with video clips and other kinds of images.

 Future CERAS Projects and Next Steps

Obviously the projects and models noted in this article mark only the beginning of CERAS advancement. Future projects identified by librarians and faculty include:

These and other projects will be made available in HTML format for easy accessibility. Further efforts are being discussed as to the feasibility of using SGML, PDF files, or other formats for presenting and searching the published materials. Alternative dissemination efforts such as CD-ROM are being discussed as well to enable individuals and organizations lacking Internet connections with some form of access to these scholarly resources.

In addition to pursuing projects identified locally we need to mine University of Iowa faculty and librarian contacts with Africana specialists throughout the United States and worldwide who might be interested in contributing to the Center's efforts. To this end a "call for collaboration" has been developed to generate projects with national and international scholars and institutions. Work also needs to be coordinated with the UI Libraries consortial partners in the CIC and the Association of Research Libraries as well as with the membership of the American Library Archives Committee of the African Studies Association. The discussion forum capability will be developed and implemented so that scholars and others interested in the resources and the mission of the Center will be able to use web-based discussion forums to communicate. Scholars who contribute to the site and publish their work through the site may, if they wish, post and accept discussion questions. Students will also be encouraged to partake in the discussions.

Important next steps also include continued efforts to secure grant funding and creative approaches to build staffing. Currently CERAS is operating with a small seed grant from the Associate Vice Provost for International Programs to assist in supporting a graduate assistant under the direction of the CERAS working group, consisting of existing staff and several active African Studies faculty.

In conclusion, the University of Iowa Libraries Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies project is based on a very simple premise. The project seeks to electronically publish original and published work of Africana scholars and create an interactive electronically based community of international scholars. The site will also be a locale for discussion of these topics and ongoing efforts to build this community and well as for the critique of new efforts and the discussion of existing efforts. It is intended as a truly global if not "virtual" community for all who study and create African studies resources. 

Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank Sheila D. Creth, University Librarian, Allen Roberts, Professor, Department of Anthropology, and Christopher D. Roy, Professor, Department of Art and Art History for their support and work in developing the original idea behind CERAS and Michael McNulty, Associate Provost for International Programs for seed money to help launch CERAS. The authors are also grateful to Paul Soderdahl, Team Leader for LWIS and Multimedia, for critical technical support, without which the project would not exist.

Members of the Center for Electronic Resources in African Studies Working Group:

Steve Ostrem
State, Foreign and International Documents Librarian
Government Publications Department
319/335-5926
steve-ostrem@uiowa.edu

Afeworki Paulos
International Studies and Political Science Bibliographer
319/335-5883
afeworki-paulos@uiowa.edu

Rijn Templeton
Librarian and Head
Art Library
319/335-3089
rijn-templeton@uiowa.edu

The Center is part of the University of Iowa Libraries' Scholarly Digital Resources Center, which serves as a "clearinghouse of digital reformatting projects being undertaken within the University Libraries."

University Libraries, University of Iowa.
Copyright (c) 1998. The University of Iowa. All rights reserved.
Please send comments to: Afeworki-Paulos@uiowa.edu
URL: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/ceras/aboutus.html
Last updated: 01 December 2000