Skills Profile Development Workshop

This online workshop that took place on August 19, 2020 at 11:00 - 13:30 UTC is part of the objective in AfricaConnect3 to establish a framework to guide the development of Open Access Repositories (OARs) and Open Access Journals (OAJs).

Stakeholders discussed the evolving skills profiles of African higher learning institutions (HLI) librarians using feedback generated from the LIBSENSE workshops in 2018/19. The result was the determination of a set of preferred skills profiles to support ongoing digitalisation (e.g. OAR development, data analytics, support for Open Science) that suit an African HLI context.

At a later date, a second workshop will examine the data cycle around agricultural research and the required skills for librarians.

Workshop materials and video recording: http://bit.ly/SkillsProfileWorkshopMaterials

Guest Speaker: John Willinsky, Stanford University

Talk:  What I’ve Learned from Librarians: Becoming Partners in Sharing Knowledge

John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University. He rose, as a teenager, to be president of his high school library club and has since then worked with librarians to support access to knowledge and research.

This work has included starting the Public Knowledge Project in 1998, which developed Open Journal Systems, the platform used by African Journals Online, Ghana Journals Online, and other scholarly journal portals

The goal of the talk is to provide a very clear example of how librarians can create learning environments for their institutions and themselves that are capable of contributing to their institution’s research culture and benefiting their communities.