Librarians, IT specialists, CERN staff members and staff of the Prempeh II Library gather for the CERN digital library workshop. (Image: CERN)
In December 2016, CERN staff members went to Kumasi, Ghana, to introduce the Invenio digital library software developed at CERN to librarians and IT specialists. Thirty participants from eight different African countries gathered for the week-long training course.
A follow-up week offering about six participants of the Kumasi school advanced training on digital libraries will also take place at CERN during spring 2017. The purpose of the school is to deepen participants’ understanding of digital libraries, expose new trends in scientific publishing and emphasise a set of principles related to open access to both data and publications, which is crucial to promoting open science.
This is not the first time the CERN & Society Foundation has partnered on projects in Ghana. In 2012, CERN donated 220 decommissioned servers and 30 routers to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). These servers are now being used at the National Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NIMS, hosted at KNUST, a facility partly financed by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
CERN’s Data Centre contains around 10 000 computers that need to be upgraded every four to five years. Once decommissioned, these computers, although obsolete for CERN’s cutting-edge research purposes, are still suitable for less demanding applications and can be donated to other institutes.
The CERN-UNESCO School for Digital Libraries is a CERN & Society project and the 2016 school in Ghana was made possible thanks to a generous donation made by Ms Margarita Louis-Dreyfus.
To learn more about the CERN & Society Foundation’s activities and how you can be involved, visit the dedicated page.