Abstracts Category : Other

Trends indigital scholarship curation in public and private higher educationinstitutions in Southern Africa : a sociotechnical approach towardssustainability

by Wyk Brenda Van

Universities and higher education institutions (HEIs)are knowledge intensive environments. Research and scholarshipcreated here are institutional knowledge capital and must bemanaged as assets to give the institution a competitive edge inresearch and academic stature. The status and prestige of HEIsdepend on the quality, visibility and accessibility of theirresearch. As such, knowledge capital must be managed as assets thatwill ensure return on investment (ROI). Scholarship availed indissertations, theses, proceedings and publications form part ofthe institutional knowledge capital. Digitised institutionalrepositories (IRs) are the preferred method of showcasingscholarship on the internet, adding to the HEIs web visibility.IRs developed over the past twenty years to become sophisticatednetworked digital research collections. Research intensiveuniversities and institutions reap benefits from showcasingscholarship digitally in well-developed IRs, as well as in peerreviewed academic journals. HEIs with well-developed and maintainedIRs rank consistently higher on webometrics ranking sites. All HEIsectors have not benefited equally from IR developments, and manyAfrican HEIs still do not perform according to world trendsobserved on ranking sites and directories. Globally, recentresearch indicates that valuable research output originates fromboth public and private HEIs, but scholarships are often notarchived and curated sustainably in all cases. Despite rapid growthand developments in digital scholarship curation some private andpublic HEIs are lagging behind. Private HEIs in Southern Africa arestill not visible and readily accessible on the web. SouthernAfrican private HEIs rank significantly lower than comparativepublic HEIs. Poor scholarship curation and lack of researchvisibility deter HEIs from taking their rightful place in highereducation and higher education research communities. Where researchcollections are not managed sustainably as knowledge capital, fullROI will not be possible. Recently IR research changed focus, froman initial information management (IM) and information technology(IT) approach, when questions around the role of the human elementin the process of scholarship curation came to the fore. Knowledgemanagement (KM) principles such as scholarship as knowledgecapital, the value of research and scholarship became topics ofrecent research. Although HEI are generally slow in implementingKM, the value of KM as an institutional strategy is increasinglybeing realised by global trendsetting HEIs. The sustainability ofIRs poses challenges in HEIs where the research culture is stillnot fully developed and the importance of sustainable scholarshipcollections not yet realised. Here, the benefits and value ofresearch for the HEI cannot be optimised. Research curation isoften not supported by the HEIs research strategies, policies,archiving and curation procedures. This study aimed to investigatedigital scholarship curation trends in a purposefully selectedAdvisors/Committee Members: Du Toit, Adeline S.A. (advisor).