Aluka is a not-for-profit initiative partnering with key libraries, museums, and archives around the globe to build a sustainable digital library of collections from and about the developing world, focusing, to begin with, on Africa. Aluka’s mission is to assemble these materials online and to benefit global learning and research by providing a powerful set of search and analysis tools. The Aluka collections will be made accessible via the Internet to not-for-profit research and academic institutions; they will provide access to difficult to reach and physically scattered materials, thereby improving the educational experience of students and scholars across the globe.

The principal audience for Aluka’s collections will be colleges, universities, centers of advanced study, research and training units, cultural heritage institutions, and policy centers. The primary purpose of digitizing the content is to enhance access, but in some cases digitization will also preserve materials that are in danger of being lost. By partnering with institutions and scholars in Africa, Aluka is also building institutional capacity, providing technical assistance and training, and helping foster ongoing networks of interested scholars and institutions.

Aluka’s collections are organized around broad themes with wide inter-disciplinary appeal. The first three collections are under development and are described below; additional collections will be added over time.

Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa
The Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa collection will document the liberation struggles in southern Africa since the end of World War II through a carefully selected set of primary and secondary sources, including books, periodicals, historical documents, newspaper clippings, organizational records, personal papers of historical figures, oral histories, photographs, and other visual materials. Phase one of the project will cover five countries: Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. Later phases will add materials from other southern African countries such as Angola, Tanzania, and Zambia. The collection builds on a pilot project, funded by the Foundation, called Digital Imaging South Africa (DISA—see disa.nu.ac.za) that digitized approximately 60,000 pages of underground anti-Apartheid periodicals published between 1960 and 1994.

African Plants
The African Plants Initiative is a collaboration among nearly 50 herbaria and botanic gardens in Africa, Europe, and the United States with the aim of creating a digital library of scholarly resources about African plants. The database will contain approximately 300,000 high resolution images of plant specimens linked to a wide range of related images and data, including photographs, drawings, botanic art, field notes, and standard reference works. By aggregating materials from such a broad array of sources and making them easily accessible online, the project will significantly transform the way research and teaching about African plants is conducted.

African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes
The African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes collection will link new high-quality visual documentation of selected World Heritage Sites—including two- and three-dimensional models of architectural structures and monuments, GIS mappings, and site plans—to collections of site-related scholarly resources such as excavation reports, manuscripts, field notes, unpublished documentation, travelogues, slides, books, and journal articles. The first set of sites have been selected in Tanzania (Kilwa Kisiwani), Ethiopia (Axum and Lalibela), Ghana (Elmina Castle and selected Asante traditional buildings), Mali (the mosques of Djenne and Timbuktu), and Zimbabwe (Great Zimbabwe and Nyanga).

Additional information about Aluka is available at www.aluka.org.