British Library Endangered Archives blog: New online – March 2023. “This month we would like to highlight five new collections that have recently been made available online. They have come from South Africa, India, Nepal and from Georgia.”
News24: Tutu infinity and beyond: Mourning period ends, but Arch’s legacy to live on in ‘Heirloom Project’. “The [Archbishop Tutu IP Trust and the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation] plan to move forward in protecting his work and legacy through a new global digital journey called the Heirloom Project. It will be a single-site, accessible and usable global digital archive called ‘The Heirloom Project’, which will eulogise Tutu in collaboration with South African and international universities associated with him.”
New-to-me, from International Journalists’ Network: This South African initiative helps newsrooms access women experts. “A South Africa-based nonprofit media company called Quote This Woman+ (QTW+) has curated a database of women experts in Africa for journalists to reach out to…. The database, which started in 2019 as a spreadsheet with 40 sources, now has over 600 African female experts and other experts from underrepresented groups.”
Cape Talk: Robben Island calls on former political prisoners to maintain historic database . “The Robben Island Museum (RIM) is asking for EPPS or their relatives to update their contact details and other key information on the latest records held by the Department. Initially compiled in 1997, the RIM ex-Political Prisoner Database (EPPD) is a living document that requires public contribution and input to ensure it remains true to South Africa’s struggle heroes, both known and unknown.”
EOS: Geospatial Database for the Prince Edward Islands Think South Africa, not Anne of Green Gables. “As rare landmasses dotting the vast Southern Ocean, South Africa’s Prince Edward Islands provide valuable insights for climatologists, geographers, biologists, botanists, and even astronomers…. But despite their value to science, spatial data and associated metadata for the two islands (Marion and Prince Edward) were difficult to assess and validate.”
North-West University: Spelling checker tool for SA languages now available to download for free. “The Spelling Checkers for South African Languages, a spelling and hyphenation checker tool for ten of South Africa’s official languages, excluding English, is now available to download for free from the website of the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR).”
News 24: Digitising heritage: How one project is making our multilingual history accessible. “For 500 years, much of South Africa’s history has remained locked away in languages that don’t feature in school and university textbooks. But a project driven by the University of Cape Town, in partnership with Rhodes University, is making South Africa’s history available in indigenous languages on a digital platform – creating an accessible historical reference that reflects our multicultural society.”
Tech Central: Google’s giant Equiano Internet cable has landed in South Africa. “The Equiano subsea Internet cable was landed at Melkbosstrand north of Cape Town on Monday, the last stop on the route south for the 12-fibre-pair system that promises to drive down Internet costs in South Africa when it comes online in the coming months.”
GroundUp: Restoring UCT’s burnt archives will take years. “After the flames that gutted the Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 18 April 2021 were finally extinguished, the archives were thought to be lost….Now, 14 months later, at Maitland House in Mowbray, the painstaking process of rebuilding the collection is underway.”
Reuters: South Africa’s Competition Watchdog Says Google’s Ad Practices Distort Competition. “South Africa’s Competition Commission, which has been probing online markets for over a year, has provisionally found that Google’s paid search results distort competition, making it a ‘de facto monopolist’ in general search.”
Daily Maverick: SA’s new copyright law, backed by Google, is slated by the creative industry . “The strangest alliance has been formed between copyright and intellectual property (IP) academics, US tech giant Google and the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, which have collaborated to make South Africa’s copyright law weaker. Opposing this are South Africa’s artists, musicians, authors, filmmakers and others within the creative industry who believe this week’s adoption of the Copyright Amendment Bill and the Performers’ Protection Amendment Bill by the Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Trade, Industry and Competition has, in effect, thrown them to the wolves.”
East Coast Radio: Did this woman’s reliance on Google Translate ruin her daughter’s reputation at school?. “We are not saying that Google Translate isn’t reputable, but we do believe it to be an online resource that is meant to provide an overall understanding. Perhaps not the precise meaning of words… This mother bravely took to TikTok sharing her experience with the service when it came to helping her 11-year-old with her Afrikaans homework.” Laughed myself silly.
IOL (South Africa): ‘Voices of Women Museum’ opens online. ” The ‘Voices of Women Museum’ is now virtual and will be launched on Friday…. Developed as a concept in 2012, the museum has a substantial collection of about 3 000 women’s narratives and story cloths.” You’ll have to give the site a minute to load, but it’s worth the wait. One of the more polished virtual spaces I’ve visited, well done.
New Frame: South African history, through Rashid Lombard’s lens. “A tragedy for many South African photographers is the disarray and neglect of their archives. This includes apartheid-era photographers who did not have the resources to preserve their collections. And once they are elderly or die, the responsibility falls to their families, who often don’t have the capacity to honour their archives either. Their legacies risk being lost forever. This makes the project that Lombard and his team are starting profoundly important. He has handed the custodianship of his complete archive to the University of the Western Cape (UWC), with the rights remaining with his family. He is also starting the three-year process of digitising his archive, planning to open a photography centre guided by his vision.”
New York Times: South Africa’s latest surge is a possible preview of the pandemic’s next chapter. . “South Africa experienced a decline in cases after hitting an Omicron-fueled, pandemic peak in December. But in the past week, cases have tripled, positivity rates are up and hospitalizations have also increased, health officials said. The surge has the country facing a possible fifth wave. The spike is linked to BA.4 And BA.5, two subvariants that are part of the Omicron family.”
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