OSSREA Documentation Center (ODC)

Objectives

·      To create a data bank that will provide useful information to universities and research centers in the region

·      To collect, preserve, and make accessible to researchers African archives

·      To collect and make available to members, researchers and other users scientific and up-to-date literature and other relevant materials in the social sciences, especially those related to the region

·      To provide users with reference materials

·      To document and facilitate OSSREA’s workshop and training activities

·      To provide a reading room to all eligible users.

The ODC is housed on the first floor of the OSSREA Secretariat building in Addis Ababa. By March 2002, it has collected a total of 1768 publications and documents, including books, journals and other periodicals, directories and reference materials, research reports, working papers, official documents, workshop and conference papers and miscellanea. These materials are acquired through regular subscriptions and orders, donations, and exchange arrangements made with other research and academic institutions.

The subject classification and cataloguing of all new collections are regularly carried out using CDS/ISIS software. Users have easy access to the computer for searching the materials in the ODC’s holdings, for internet access, and for taking notes. In addition, the ODC also has an audio-visual facility for looking at and/or listening to tape/video recordings of documentaries or the proceedings of OSSREA workshops and other events.

Eligible users of the ODC include OSSREA members, researchers with official certification or ID, post-graduate students, university teachers, OSSREA trainees, workshop participants, and other accredited scholars and visitors. Through each issue of the OSSREA Newsletter, the ODC regularly informs the university community and other users about its new acquisitions. 

Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program

Objectives

·       To create a network of actual contacts between distinguished scholars in the universities in the region;

·      To give African scholars the opportunity to debate their new ideas with colleagues, students and decision makers in various countries before committing them to publication, which most cases takes place outside the region and does not alleviate the book famine back home;

·      To allow some young scholars from the North to benefit from such an exchange programme and give maturity to their own thoughts while encouraging their African audience to do likewise through organised debates;

·      To ensure that topical issues such as empowerment of the people, democracy from the grassroots, Africa’s place in the new economic order, issue of ethnicity, gender and regional conflicts, environmental crisis, the place of indigenous knowledge in present production systems and an African agenda beyond year 2000 will be the areas of concentration of the first two years programme;

·      To use the opportunity of such a visit to start building a network of researchers around one or more of the above mentioned topics

·      To publish a number of the public lectures in this programme in OSSREA’s Occasional Paper Series.