Supporting Data Preservation Through Institutional Repositories of the Academic Libraries in South Africa: A Case Study of Three Academic Libraries

Introduction And Background

Institutional Repositories (IR’s) are open access platforms that serve as archives for intellectual output for different research disciplines in higher education institutions (HEIs). The emergence of institutional repositories has proven to be integral for the dissemination and preservation of intellectual content. Institutional repositories have also been on the frontline of the open access movement by offering wide and unrestricted access to research output from a variety of faculties in higher education institutions (Adjei, Mensah & Amoaful, 2019). The literature on the subject matter essentially highlights access and preservation of data as the two underlying functions of institutional repositories (Francke, Gamalielsson & Lundell, 2017). From a global landscape, it would seem that long-term preservation of data in institutional repositories is still a grey area, as most institutional repositories focus on providing access and dissemination of data. Li and Banach (2011) argue that the implementation of data preservation is still at its infancy. Barrueco and Termens (2021) state that the scarce number of articles published confirms that the interest of repository managers has been focused on other issues other than to assure the long-term availability of the assets they store.

Seemingly, developing countries in Africa are still far behind in terms of long-term data preservation. Against this backdrop, this study investigated the University of Zululand, University of KwaZulu-Natal and Durban University of Technology’s academic libraries in South Africa to establish how they support data preservation through their institutional repositories while adding to the body of literature in the Library and Information Science domain. Kari and Baro (2016) as well as Adjei, Mensah and Amoahful (2021), claim that many IR activities in most academic libraries only focus on creating repositories, depositing content, promoting discovery and access and/or encouraging the necessary cultural change, but not on how to preserve the content for long-term accessibility. Mensah (2015:2) also identify that there are inadequate data preservation methods in institutional repositories of African libraries which could result in serious ramifications such as inaccessibility and loss of data. Moseti (2016:137) attained findings of a similar nature in Kenyan universities, and further states that digital preservation has not been embedded as an integral part of the repositories’ workflow and there is neither much experience nor commonly agreed best practice as to how digital preservation is best performed.