It has been two weeks since the conclusion of the Datacite & Open Scholarship Cadres for Uganda workshop hosted at Busitema University’s Engineering Library. The workshop was met with success, and all participants are being congratulated on reaching this milestone. The workshop served as an introduction to various topics including Open Access, Open Access Infrastructure, Resource Optimization, and Interoperability and Retrieval. The curriculum for the workshop was derived from UNESCO’s Open Access (OA) Curriculum for Library Schools, and all workshop materials are now available on the Workshop Website and archived in the Busitema University Institutional Repository.
As part of the resolutions reached during the workshop, attendees agreed to maintain the connection established through this event and continue networking via the Datacite & Open Scholarship Cadres for Uganda online forum. Through this platform, participants will report on their plans to implement the action points agreed upon, while also providing support to one another in achieving the workshop’s objectives.
The workshop aimed to equip participants with the ability to effectively communicate the importance of institutional repositories for open research outputs, utilize open infrastructure and services such as Dspace and DataCite tools to make research outputs open and discoverable and teach and train others in implementing DataCite research discovery and exploration tools and services in institutional repositories among other key objectives.
In the coming weeks, there is a plan to develop action points for each of the learning outcomes to assess the extent to which the participants have been able to learn and implement these objectives within their own institutions. It was agreed that by the end of the workshop, the Cadres should be able to:
a) communicate to their institutional administrators why libraries and their institutions cannot afford to ignore implementing institutional repositories to make their research outputs open;
b) explain how to go about using open infrastructure and services like Dspace and DataCite tools to make their research outputs open and discoverable;
c) understand how to teach and train librarians, ICT professionals, and research administrators to implement DataCite research discovery and exploration tools and services like DOIs, metadata, APIs in their institutional repositories;
d) become confident and have the knowledge to deal with difficult questions about making research outputs open and discoverable;
e) be able to plan institutional repository and DataCite training activities and be aware of the best practices in training design for online, face-to-face and hybrid events;
f) understand how to work with diverse audiences especially institutional administrators to attract funding towards DataCite activities;
g) know how to evaluate the impact of the training and implementing institutional repositories and DataCite open infrastructure and services.
Looking ahead, measures will be taken to ensure all participants are registered on the Datacite & Open Scholarship Cadres for Uganda Forum, and can effectively use its features to read and actively participate in discussions.
To initiate this process, a Zoom session is set to take place between Wednesday 19th and Friday 21st June 2024, aimed at offering support to all the participants in registering on the forum and enabling them to make posts, reply to others, and add multimedia content. Further details regarding participation in the Forum registration exercise will be shared via a provided link. Once all participants are registered, communication will be routed through the Forum, with the WhatsApp Group being used solely to alert members about new posts on the Forum requiring their attention.
The organizers are enthusiastic about the outcomes of the workshop and are looking forward to the continued impact of the Datacite & Open Scholarship Cadres for Uganda initiative.
