Background
AGORA, HINARI and OARE are three major Internet-based portals that provide low-income countries throughout the world, though primarily Africa, free or low lost access to the world’s journal literature in agriculture, health and the environment. The Access to Research for Development and Innovation (ARDI) program is coordinated by WIPO together with its partners in the publishing industry with the aim to increase the availability of scientific and technical information in developing countries.
The collective name for the four programmes – HINARI, AGORA, OARE and ARDI – Research4Life provides developing countries with free or low cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online. Eligible libraries and their users benefit from:
- Online access to over 44,000 peer-reviewed international scientific journals, books, and databases
- Full-text articles which can be downloaded for saving, printing or reading on screen
- Searching by keyword, subject, author or language
- Resources available in several languages
- Training in information literacy and promotional support
Research4Life is a public-private partnership of the WHO, FAO, UNEP, WIPO, Cornell and Yale Universities and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers. Working together with technology partner Microsoft, the partnership’s goal is to help attain six of the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, reducing the scientific knowledge gap between industrialized countries and the developing world.
E-Resources Training Workshop – Khartoum (Sudan):
Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa (ITOCA) of South Africa is contrasting with the Agricultural Research Corporation (ARC), Khartoum, Sudan to provide logistical support to organize and carry out of four-day workshop to train DAAD scholars, library staff, researchers and decision makers in the use of electronic scientific journal delivery programmes, principally Research4life and TEEAL, and information literacy components. The workshop has been organized at the Information Technology and Linguistics Centre (ITLC), AlzaiemAlazhari University (AAU), Khartoum North during the period 23rd – 26th January, 2017. The training workshop was attended by 30 participants from DAAD Scholars, well professional of different background disciplines related to agriculture, health, environment and related sciences.
The workshop objective and structure:
The training workshop seeks to increase the quality and effectiveness of research and education in health, agriculture, environment and related biological and social sciences, which would contribute toward improving food security in Sudan and encourage cross disciplinary collaboration between agriculture, health and environment. The outcome of the workshop is to enable researchers, policy-makers, educators, librarians and extension specialists have access to high quality, relevant and timely information on agriculture, health and environment via the internet, CD-ROM and external hard disk. The workshop has Training of Trainer approach (ToT) and comprises lectures delivered in classroom setting, hands-on exercises and group work. Some exercises are involved accessing relevant live websites and portals on the internet and other are conducted offline. Each participant accessed to computer or participants laptop and internet and WIFI accessed during training sessions.
Methodology:-
The training sessions were composed of different packages such as theoretical and practical methods as well as participatory approach which were used as training methodology to ensure the quality of training are there and to ensure there is no gap of understanding among the different levels of participants. In addition, translation to Arabic was used for the same purposes.
The training sessions were divided into 11 Modules and each module has sub-sessions and activities.
The practical package was composed of hand out for the exercises, home work, and application of the knowledge that was gained.
DAAD-Sudan e-resources Training workshop:-
The training was implemented jointly between The Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa (ITOCA) and Agricultural Research Corporation Sudan (ARC) and funded and sponsored by DAAD and attended by 30 participants from DAAD Sudan Scholars and the training Venue was the Information Technology and Linguistics Centre at AlzaimAlazhari University (AAU) Khartoum North, Sudan.
The source persons and facilitators was Dr. Pamela AyieraMarindafrom ITOCA and the national co-facilitators were Prof. RaffaAshmalla from National Center for Research (NCR), Mrs. AhlamIsmail Musa (ARC), Mr. ElkhidirElyass (ARC) as well as Eng. IhabShoully from Sudanese Knowledge Society (SKS).