Inspiring access to the jewels of Africa through digitisation

In the first week of August I embarked on a journey to present a workshop at the Biodiversity Heritage Library Africa (BHLA) Training Workshop at the National Museums of Kenya. The workshop was specifically tailored for the needs of various museums and organisations that want to digitise their own biodiversity related books. There were 17 participants from the following 7 institutions:

• University of Nairobi (https://www.uonbi.ac.ke/)
• Icipe (http://www.icipe.org/)
• National Museums of Kenya
• Kenya Wildlife Service (http://www.kws.go.ke/)
• African Conservation Centre (https://www.accafrica.org/)
• Malindi Museum Society (https://www.facebook.com/malindims/)
• South African National Biodiversity Institute (https://www.sanbi.org/)

The first day of the workshop included theory based information on metadata, paper preservation, and digitisation standards (such as file formats and file naming standards) focusing on the standards in general but including the standards for Biodiversity Heritage Library. The audience was very engaging and asked leading questions. On the second day of the workshop the programme focused on practical exercises. Each participant was given the opportunity to learn some of the features of GIMP (open-source cross platform image editor) including how to straighten skew pages and how to crop pages. The workshop was designed to reflect the correct flow of work when digitising, so the third day of the workshop was focused on everything the participants needed to know about metadata and quality assurance (in  general, but also the standards for Biodiversity Heritage Library) and it also included a demonstration of Adobe Acrobat Pro.

At the end of each day and after each session, questions were asked. It was a learning curve in which all  participants learned from one another and provided advice based on previous experience where there was uncertainty. The aim was to equip the participants with the knowledge to digitise according to international standards and according to the feedback received, the workshop succeeded in its aim.