Digital Library Services

Digital Preservation

Digital Library Services offer a curation service for digitisation projects undertaken by UCT Libraries to ensure that digital collections are created, organised, documented, preserved and made accessible in perpetuity by applying best practices for managing the lifecycle of digital objects.

Data Stewards

The UCT Data Stewards and champions is based on a community of practice approach where members have a shared domain of interest, a sense of community and a shared practice. Data Stewards help spread best data practices in their community and help DLS with curating data on our publishing platforms.

Our Data Stewards and Champions Community meets once every month to share ideas, stories and recent development around working with data at UCT.

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Research Data Management

Our RDM services assist researchers with organising, managing, curating and sharing their research data, to facilitate its preservation and access for present and future use. Together with UCT eResearch and ICTS, we give you access to the datasets and tools that you need to enhance and complete your research.

Digital Scholarship

Most of us studying, teaching or researching are digital scholars. Why? It is because we engage with digital technologies when we do our work. At DLS we offer guidance on a variety of platforms and processes, and we can guide you in many ways to enhance your digital scholarship. We cover the broad variety of projects that the university community is engaged with, aiming to support academic and non-academic staff and students.

GIS

Everything happens somewhere.
Capturing where it happens and then extracting interesting analysis from it involves working with spatial data. Geographic Information Systems are powerful tools for working with geospatial data. The GIS Lab assists researchers, staff and post-graduate students to working with spatial data within their Project Planning, Data Collection, Analysis, Visualisation and Cartographic Design.

For information on South Africa's response to COVID-19 please visit the COVID-19 Corona Virus South African Resource Portal.

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What we do?

We provide Digital Scholarship and Research Data Services to UCT, including the following:

Specialist Digitisation services for Digital Preservation and Online Showcasing;
Data Curation services, supporting good practices in Research Data Management (RDM);
Expert consulting in Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

We advocate for Open Science, to make research, teaching and learning at UCT more efficient, collaborative and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). On this mission, we are hosting a growing community of Data Stewards at UCT.

What would you like to do today?

Start a data management plan (DMP)

Share or publish my data

Convert items to a digital format

Setup a space to collaborate

Organise and store my data

Analyse spatial data

News

Friday, 22 October 2021

Digital Scholar Series August - October 2021

For the second semester of 2021, the Digital Library Services (DLS) department of UCT Libraries will continue to live stream their Digital Scholar Series. Presenters from DLS will showcase some of the practices and tools available to enhance your research skills through Digital Scholarship, with a particular focus on managing your research data efficiently. See the full schedule and register.

Publication Date:

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 - 14:15

Ibali Iindaba Returns

As part of the launch of Ibali: Digital Collections UCT, DLS is running monthly workshop sessions on Wednesdays from 1 to 2 pm. Each session will look at a different functionality or collection in the system. This will give participants an opportunity to get familiar with using the new Ibali platform (powered by Omeka S) to view and build showcase sites for their collections.

Publication Date:

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 - 09:15

Celebrate Open Data Day 2021 with UCT Libraries

We’ll be presenting the many benefits of different kinds of open data. For the 11th year running, groups from around the world are creating local events where you can learn about open data and its uses. The goal of Open Data Day is to encourage adoption of relevant policies and practices in government, business and civil society.

View conference proceedings on ZivaHub: https://zivahub.uct.ac.za/UCT_Open_Data_Day_2021

Publication Date:

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 - 16:00

Research Data Management Workshops Digital Scholar Series 2021

For the first semester of 2021, the Digital Library Services (DLS) department of UCT Libraries will be live streaming our Digital Scholar Series. Presenters from DLS will showcase some of the practices and tools available to enhance your research skills through Digital Scholarship, with a particular focus on managing your research data efficiently .

Publication Date:

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 - 11:45