The Development of a User-generated Digital Library

Session 10c, 31 May 2013 IST-Africa 2013 Copyright 2013 McNulty Consulting
The Development of a User-generated Digital Library:
The Case of the Ulwazi Programme
Niall McNulty
McNulty Consulting
South Africa

The Ulwazi Programme
• The Ulwazi Programme is a digital community library of
indigenous knowledge and oral histories.
• It is based in the eThekwini Municipality and operates (since
2008) in urban, peri-urban and rural areas within municipal
boundaries.
• It is an initiative run through the Libraries & Heritage
Department, which uses social web technology, the public
library and the community to collect content for the library.
• The goals of the programme are to enable local communities
to make African stories part of the global information
economy; to build capacity in local digital media production;
to promote and encourage community participation in the
global knowledge society and to build social cohesion.

Motivation, problem area
• This photographs is of a rural area near the Western
boundaries of the eThekwini Municipality.
• Part of the rationale behind the project development was to
draw these rural areas of the Municipality into the information
society by provided much needed digital media skills &
recording relevant oral knowledge that may otherwise be lost.
• Local knowledge and ways of doing things in Africa have
historically been transmitted orally from one generation to the
next. In South Africa, various factors like urban migration and
the AIDS pandemic in younger generations have disrupted
these chains of cultural transmission.
• Digital technologies, in particular, mobile phones, offer some
ways in which this information can be recorded and
circulated.

Case Study: Project Structure
• The three pillars on which the programme rests are the Community;
the Library; and the Technology.
• The library is the anchor partner in the project and provides
infrastructure through the 90 public libraries in the Municipality,
each with its own internet-enabled computer; they also provide
training, technology support and data collection.
• Through volunteer citizen journalists, the community records their
own knowledge in a community-specific way; while community
participation contributes to the protection of local knowledge.
• The recent emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has allowed for
large-scale collaboration in the creation of online, user-generated
content. In the Ulwazi Programme, the preservation of indigenous
knowledge and oral histories takes place through a community-
managed web portal using open-source, social software
technologies.

e-Skills Development
• A key component of the programme is training and we provide
volunteers with training on how to conduct research and
interviews, on digital media production, article writing and
information and digital literacy.
• The Programme is co-ordinated from a central programme
office, where training, data management and other functions are
performed, including assistance with transcriptions and
translations, and image processing and archiving. The core team
holds monthly editorial meetings where new submissions are
discussed and issues covered. These also serve as continual
training and support sessions for the community journalists.
• The development of the relevant local content in local languages
encourages the use of ICTs and the Internet in the general
public.

Major Outcomes/Results
• The Programme collects oral histories, folk-tales, information
on traditional uses of plants, the preparation of food,
traditional ceremonies, indigenous games, personal and
family histories, and heritage sites, and any other information
related to the Municipality. This Ulwazi programme mainly
records Zulu culture, but it has the broader aim of capturing
the mix and interaction of different cultures in the Durban
area. The types of content collected include audio and video
files, photographs and documents, and text articles.
• The whole system is multilingual with articles published in
English and Zulu. However, most of the content accessed by
users is predominantly n Zulu. This is due to the lack of online
content in Zulu. As an example, the Zulu version of Wikipedia
has only around 500 articles.

Major Outcomes/Results continued ...
• The project has been a success, receiving over a thousand visitors
a day. Most of these visitors are interested in Zulu-language and
local content, which suggests a need for such content online. The
most-accessed articles on the Ulwazi Programme website are
linked to traditional ceremonies and customs of the Zulu people.
This data reiterates that local users are searching for local content
online, and finding it through the Ulwazi Programme website.
• 80% of all visitors to the Ulwazi Programme arrive through search
engines. Google Analytics tracks this data, including the search-
engine keywords used to find the Ulwazi Programme website.
These keywords indicate the type of content people are actively
searching for. Most of the top search terms are in the Zulu language
and about traditional culture. The Ulwazi Programme – with a
critical mass of Zulu articles, in particular of a cultural nature – has
become a key resource for search engines.

Recognition

Conclusion and outlook
• Through the Ulwazi Programme, communities of eThekwini have
been given the skills to develop and access digital content in their
own language and create and maintain a local heritage resource.
• There are currently around 900 articles, half of them in Zulu,
providing online access to local indigenous knowledge and
histories. A number of community journalists have been trained in
digital media production and have gone on to full-time employment
with companies in the Municipality.
• Web analytics show a steady increase in visitors - from Durban, the
rest of South Africa and internationally. Most visitors arrive through
search engines such as Google which suggests that people are
searching for local information online.
• We’ve developed a model for the development of a local digital
heritage resource that is replicable, scalable and makes good use
of limited resources.

The Development of a User-generated Digital Library

More Related Content

What's hot (10)

Viewers also liked (20)

Similar to The Development of a User-generated Digital Library (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

The Development of a User-generated Digital Library