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Aluka, Digital Library of African Culture

From the Aluka website:

Aluka, a not-for-profit, collaborative and international initiative, announces the release of its online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. ‘Aluka’ is derived from a Zulu word meaning ‘to weave,” reflecting Aluka’s mission to connect resources and scholars from around the world.

Aluka’s partners have contributed materials ranging from archival documents, periodicals, books, reports, manuscripts, and reference works, to three-dimensional models, maps, oral histories, plant specimens, photographs, and slides. The African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes database links high-quality visual, contextual, and spatial documentation. The Aluka digital library includes photographs, 3D models, GIS data, site plans, aerial and satellite photography, images of African rock art, excavation reports, manuscripts, traveller’s accounts, historical and antiquarian maps, books, articles, and other scholarly research.

This resource is available at the University of Chicago on a trial basis until December 31, 2007. Please direct comments to Rob Pleshar in the University Libraries or to the VRC.

By mmacken

twitter: meganmacken

Director, Visual Resources Center and Digital Media Archive, Division of the Humanities, The University of Chicago.

My academic background ranges from classics and comparative literature to modern art and architectural history, and so, naturally, I am a librarian. I have graduate degrees in art history and library science, manage digital image and audio collections for the Division of the Humanities, and am always eager to collaborate across disciplines, universities, and even continents! I'm interested in exploring the library's role in Digital Humanities, not just as an archive for born-digital objects but as a locus for Digital Humanities centers. At THATCamp I'm excited to find out how others are visualizing data, especially to facilitate creative research and teaching in art and architectural history and film studies. How can visual data (still images, film, 3D models, etc) move beyond illustration and become a source for research? What kind of creative information retrieval interfaces do we need to do this? We've got metadata...let's make it work!

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