FALL 2008 / Volume 8 - Issue 1
Digitizing Resources Essential for Senegal Library
By Anna Riggenbach, ’08
Keeping our history records is something that seems easy to do in this digital age. Even viewing the Declaration of Indepen- dence can be done from our own living room. But what if this convenience wasn’t an option? In Senegal, it isn’t.
The Department of Pan-African Studies, along with the Faculty Professional Development Center (FPDC), is working on digitizing the primary resources in Senegal to eventually build a library. Last summer, administrators and faculty from Kent State met with researchers from Massachusetts, as well as West African historians and librarians and the West African Research Association in Senegal. This was an opportunity to talk face-to-face about the work that would soon be taking place.
Jeffrey Pellegrino, assistant director of FPDC, says there are thousand-year-old manuscripts that were buried in the sand that need to be digitized. But this is more easily said than done.
“You can’t just run the documents in a scanner,” Pellegrino says. “There is a technical side to it. It’s a harmful process to many old documents.”
Africa has been through phases of digitizing documents, but in the past, workers would get part way through and the technology would change.
“We didn’t want to go in and say, ‘do it this way,’” he says. “We ended up backing away from technology. We are trying to facilitate things behind the scenes.”
A new strategy is to hire older women to read the Arabic on the documents and handwrite the information. A constant struggle for the people working on digitizing the documents is preservation versus conservation. Preservation would involve making straight copies of the documents, while conserving the documents would better protect and harvest them in a scholarly way.
“If this information is valuable, the easiest way to move it around is digitally,” Pellegrino says. “Communities could understand their heritage and where this information lies in their current state.”
It is important for the communities in Senegal to get information from these documents because they could explain medicines and languages of the area. The manuscripts in these small communities are a seat of power and contain everything from lineage to war documentation, medicine and astronomy.
“We only have 200 years of history here, but in Africa, you’ve got millennia to deal with,” Pellegrino says. “It’s not as easy as putting history into one textbook. It is important that they understand their history.”
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