Invited Talk 2: Decolonization and Metadata

Hussein Suleman is Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town. His main research interests are in digital libraries, ICT4D, African language Information Retrieval, cultural heritage preservation, Internet technology and educational technology. He has in the past worked extensively on architecture, scalability and interoperability issues related to digital library systems. He has worked closely with international and national partnerships for metadata archiving, including: the Open Archives Initiative; Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations; and the NRF-CHELSA South African National ETD Project. His recent research has a growing emphasis on the relationship between low resource environments and digital library architectures. This has evolved into a focus on societal development and its alignment with digital libraries and information retrieval. He is currently collaborating with various colleagues in digital humanities groups to develop a proof-of-concept and experimental low-resource software toolkit for digital repositories; this reconceptualision of the architecture of digital repositories will arguably lower the bar for adoption and reduce the risk of data loss for archivists in low-resource environments.