I was pleased to be asked to give the after-dinner talk at your Golden Jubilee Conference, since it means that I will have gone full circle in my SCOLMA involvement. As a keen and young(ish) new member of the SCOLMA Committee I was invited to spend 18 months as joint organiser of what I think remains the largest event that SCOLMA has yet hosted, the 1977 Bibliography Conference marking fifteen years of SCOLMA's existence and a decade since the International Conference on African Bibliography held in Nairobi, 1967. As I became a SCOLMA office-holder there were keynote addresses and Chairman's concluding remarks. Soon after my retirement, for your 40th anniversary conference (in this same venue), Pat Larby and I were invited to perform a brief warm-up act to set the scene before the serious contributions began.

Africa is a region made up of different countries; occupied by people of different ethnicities and cultures with a rapidly growing population. “Africa's population has been growing 2.3 per cent per year, a rate more than double that of Asia's population (1 per cent per year). The population of Africa first surpassed a billion in 2009 and is expected to add another billion in just 35 years (by 2044)”. It is also a region whose countries are at different levels of development; politically, socially and economically. Politically, at least since the 1990s, most of the countries are moving away from one party forms of governance and military dictatorships to multiparty political dispensations. Socially it has been affected and afflicted by poverty, diseases and internal conflicts that have brought a lot of suffering to its peoples.

Institutional Repository (IR) is seen as a new way for an institution to contribute to the broader world of scholarship. The system is also seen as a collaboration between libraries, technologists, administrators, and faculty to enhance access to the scholarship of the institution. Preserving the institution's intellectual property and increasing the institution's visibility and prestige are some of the reasons for establishing an institutional repository (Macha and De Jager, 2011). Giesecke (2011) is of the view that institutional repositories require carefully thought plans, mutual consultation among all stakeholders and “with intellectual leadership from the faculty and the library working in partnership” there will be successful preservation and continued fostering of the growth of the human knowledge.

Photographs do not seem to have received the attention they deserve as primary sources of information for academic study in Ghana. Reasons for this could be that they are not seen as documents in their own right that merit the same scrutiny as that given to the printed word and archival sources. They are usually not included in the collection development policies of libraries and archives (at least in Ghana), and the existence of such collections locally is virtually unknown. They are not recognised as primary sources for academic inquiry and therefore have no place in libraries or archives; and are not considered worth preserving for posterity. Yet their value is well documented and western academic institutions devote financial resources to their collection, documentation and preservation to make their collections accessible to users (Laryea, 1997).

The explosion of information in libraries has led to several means and measures of managing this information. New technologies are driving new developments in electronic publishing and learning and people have become increasingly dependent on digital information and the internet as a medium for gaining and exchanging information. There is growing evidence in Uganda of successful digitisation projects to develop digital resources. Libraries and Archives have embarked on digitising their information resources to provide access to and to preserve their unique materials in their collections.

The records at UCU have been digitised and made available in both digital and microfilm format. The digitised Archives of the Church of Uganda Office of the Archbishop are divided into series and these are: Administrative Records, General File, Dioceses, Programs/Activities/Institutions, and Related Organisations.

The dissertation collection of INSEPS (Higher National Institute of Popular Education and Sport, Dakar, Senegal) consists of 152 documents (PDF format) related to academic work submitted between 2005 and 2008 (2005:21,2006:29, 2007: 45 and 2008: 57) as well as all references to available dissertations of INSEPS’ library (imported from a CDS/ISIS database).

These have, since January 2011, been hosted on the BEEP (Electronic libraries in partnership) website which uses the Greenstone software (Rossi, 2011). Pdf files of the collection were created either by scanning paper or by converting electronic versions (Word files). The collection of electronic documents was achieved as part of the SIST (System for Scientific and Technical Information) project funded by the MAEE (French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs).