Friday, March 28, 2008

Library automation in Africa


The automation of library in Africa is going on and on without the projects being delivered. For instance in 2005 Diana Rosenberg of INASP found that 65% of libraries in Anglophone Africa (excluding South Africa) were in the process of automation.

However, any project has a fixed timeline after which the project team is disbanded. In addition, projects have a budget.

Many studies have reported technology problems, personnel problems, financial problems etc. In project management these are looked at as risks and should be anticipated if a proper risk analysis is done.

It would appear to me that we think that money can do all things. Therefore we concentrate on writing funding proposals and have no time to plan the implementation of our projects.

The story is the same with digitisation, institutional repositories.

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