First DSpace@ScienceUofK training activity at University of Khartoum

  On Jul 24-25, 2011, the first DSpace@ScienceUofK training course has been held at the Digital Library Computer Lab in the University of Khartoum. This first course, organised and delivered by project managers Dr. Rania M. H. Baleela and Pablo de Castro, was mainly aimed to train librarians who will later contribute to the daily operation of the Institutional Repository. There were sixteen professionals attending the course, most of whom were affiliated with the U of K Faculty of Science, but there were also representatives from the Faculties of Arts, Medicine and Agriculture. Since the plan for developing the Institutional Repository is first serving the Faculty of Science and then spreading to other Faculties,
having those representatives in the room was a very good opportunity for disseminating the OASCIR project beyond the Faculty of Science walls.


The programme for the 10-hour course -whose presentations are available below- covered a wide set of topics, including both theoretical aspects of Open Access and a practical training on various tasks related to DSpace@ScienceUofK repository operation. The course list of topics was the following:

- Introduction to Open Access
- Open Access repositories
- Advantages of having an Institutional Repository
- DSpace@ScienceUofK features
- Usage statistics in Institutional Repositories
- Populating DSpace@ScienceUofK: potential sources
- Practical training: uploading and editing contents
- Open Access policies



The project managers would like to thank Dr. Abdelkarim Hassan, Deputy Dean of the University of Khartoum Library, for hosting the course at the Computer Lab, Dr. Sumaia M. Abukashawa, U of K Deputy Vice Chancellor and Dr. Salah Bashir Abdallah, Dean Faculty of Science, for their strong support of the project and eIFL.net and Carlos III University Madrid for the financial support that made possible this training activity.


A second, more researcher-focussed course will be held this week at the Faculty of Science Old Lecture Theatre (OLT) on Jul 27-28. This set of courses have a double objective:

1. Disseminating the OASCIR project so that every Faculty of Science researcher has the opportunity to learn about the DSpace@ScienceUofK pilot institutional repository, and,

2. Training a group of U of K librarians, information specialists and IT professionals for becoming the repository managers from now on, cooperating with the ingest of repository contents.