Casa África organises a debate on the future of book collection in the digital era and their role in cooperating with development

On 29th November, Casa África organises the 3rd Meeting on Library Science Book collections: cooperating with development and new technologies at its headquarters in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. It will be an intensive day that will include two panels of experts and a workshop in which representatives from the Spanish Agency of International Development Cooperation (AECID), the University of  Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), the Library of Cataluña, CEDRO, the Royal Institute Elcano, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the University of Cheikh Anta Diop (Senegal), the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) or the National Library of Equatorial Guinea will take part.

This session will also become the stage for the presentation of Kuwamba, the documentation portal of Casa África's Media Library where all the information on the activities it participates in is stored and which is open to anyone who wishes to access it: conferences, images, videos and documents. During the session, as well as representatives from official organisations, we will have the presence of experts such as David Bravo, an intellectual property expert who will talk about the accessibility of culture from book collection in the digital era.

The opening of the conference is scheduled for 09.30 hours, and will be carried out by Helena Asamoah-Hassan, a member of the International Advisory Committee, Memory of the World Programme, UNESCO and Ricardo Martínez, Casa África's General Director. After the presentation of Kuwamba, at 09.45, the meeting’s first panel will start at 10.15, under the title Digital book collection and intellectual property. It will bring together Nuria Altarriba, from the Library of Cataluña; Patricia Riera Barsallo, from CEDRO (an association that manages the rights of intellectual property for Spanish authors and editors), and David Bravo, moderated by Victor Macías from the ULPGC library.

The second panel, called Development cooperation from book collections, will be moderated by Juan Antonio Sánchez Giménez, in charge of the Documentation Centre of the Royal Institute Elcano, and includes Clotilde Abeso, Coordinator of the National Library of Equatorial Guinea; Marietou Diongue Diop, director of the library at the University of  Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal; Paiki Muswazi, in charge of the library at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Helena Asamoah-Hassan as President of the Consortium of Libraries for Academic Research in Ghana and Librarian of the Kwame Nkrumah University, Ghana.

The conference will be closed after the afternoon session of a workshop called How do you share your knowledge on Africa on Wikipedia?, given by Wikimedia Spain to promote a greater number of African contents in Spanish in Wikipedia.