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Great site:


http://www.aluka.org/?cookieSet=1

• African Plants

• Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes

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Mission

Aluka is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. Our name, ‘Aluka’, is derived from a Zulu word meaning ‘to weave’, reflecting Aluka’s mission to connect resources and scholars from around the world.

Aluka seeks to attract high-quality scholarly content about Africa from institutions and individuals across the globe. By contributing their collections to the Aluka platform, content owners will have a means of offering access to their collections to an international audience—without having to develop and support their own technology platforms. Aluka’s web-based platform provides powerful tools for research, teaching, collaboration, and knowledge exchange.

The Aluka website includes a wide variety of high-quality scholarly materials contributed by Aluka’s partners, ranging from archival documents, periodicals, books, reports, manuscripts, and reference works, to three-dimensional models, maps, oral histories, plant specimens, photographs, and slides. By aggregating these materials online, the Aluka collections link materials that are widely dispersed and difficult to access, opening up new opportunities for research, teaching, and broader public discussion. One of Aluka’s primary objectives is to provide African scholars and students with access to scholarly materials originally from Africa, but now out of their reach.

Aluka also works closely with partner organisations in Africa to build capacity in digitisation and the use of online materials for teaching and research. In some cases this includes setting up digital labs and providing technical training in scanning and creating metadata records; in others, Aluka convenes training workshops for librarians, archivists, faculty, and heritage professionals on topics related to digital imaging, preservation, and the use of online tools in the classroom.

To demonstrate the potential of Aluka as a scholarly resource, three content areas are currently under development: African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes, African Plants, and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa. New materials are added to the collections on an ongoing basis. In the longer run, our hope is that Aluka’s work in Africa will be a model for expanding the initiative to other regions of the developing world.

Aluka is a project of Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote innovation in higher education by providing research, strategic services, and infrastructure support to promising new initiatives (www.ithaka.org). Start-up funding for Ithaka and Aluka has been provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

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I don't understand what you want from me
I did post the link not knowing the mission of the project. OK?

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Originally posted by Mike111:
Arwa - I can't help but wonder why you started this thread. By your second post, it is obvious that you correctly understand it to be a flim-flam, just more of the same: White people selling Africa, so what was your point?

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