Ms Ellen Tise, President of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
Distinguished international and local guests
Members of South African Library and Information Association (LIASA)
Colleagues
Ladies and gentlemen
It’s a pleasure to be here this morning.
Today knowledge is an important productive factor in the modern economic system. It never used to be capital and resources combined to generate income and growth.
Today brainpower and creativity are more important than ever before.
At the same time, libraries are also more important than ever before, but libraries are no longer like the libraries I was used to as a student.
Today, there is a strong tendency toward concentration in world knowledge.
Most of you here will know that the academic journal market is concentrated in a few multi-national firms. You know that our scientists need to publish in international journals for themselves and to keep South African science under the international spotlight. Yet there is this peculiar situation. We provide public funds for our scientists to undertake research. They have to publish or they won’t get promoted. So they publish in scholarly journals belonging to international academic journal consortia who then sell those articles back to South African libraries at a king’s ransom.
Dr Raju sent me the United States (US) library budget. It seemed so little (some R60 million) only some three percent or so of the total university budget (like the public service, universities spend some 80 to 90 percent on personnel).
I was particularly struck by his comment that in 2001 his library spent 12 percent of his budget on digital resources. Yet in 2010 more than 70 percent of his budget was spent on digital access to information resources.
That is a very clear indication of how things have changed in the provision of information in universities.
Yet it’s not clear to me if we’re better off now than before. Academics used to compete with one another so as to take sabbaticals at the universities with most books. African universities were unable to compete at all. This was a point that Mohammed Mamdani made, speaking about the rise and fall of Makarere, at the last Commonwealth Ministers Conference.
It’s important we harness the potential of the digital environment but to achieve this we need a strong infrastructure.
I would like to mention a number of particularly notable highlights that the Department to Science and Technology (DST) is pursuing within this field.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is currently busy developing the South African National Research Network (SANREN). S&T and higher education institutions within South Africa have facilities of varying capacity, with many far below the required levels.
Until now, interaction between different institutes has been mainly limited to conferences. The project’s ultimate aim is to unite stakeholders in science, technology, higher education, R&D and governance through using a high bandwidth research network with international links to global research networks.
SANREN is expected to encourage collaboration and the creation of new national intellectual assets, enabling the sharing of high-performance computing facilities, e-libraries, virtual classrooms, and more including grid computing or cloud computing.
SANREN will also provide access to global content on emerging technologies; allow close coordination among different institutions across nations.
The national network has been rolled out and the network was launched before its due date in September 2009.
South Africa has gone further by providing for high performance computing power at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC).
The Centre for High Performance Computing is a resource, which provides us as South Africans with the tools and infrastructure to tackle major challenges collaboratively, by drawing on our own and international expertise.
In the Centre for High Performance Computing the DST has built a facility that holds its own among the best in the world.
At the end of September 2009 the CHPC launched South Africa’s newest supercomputer, a Sun Microsystems hybrid that is providing the local and regional research community with a powerful tool for tackling problems of climate change, energy security and human health.
With a peak performance of 31-trillion calculations per second, the hybrid supercomputer is the fastest in Africa and ranks among the top 500 in the world. By using the system, months of computing on research projects can be replaced in weeks, days or even hours of work.
The DST has also begun to tackle the challenge of knowledge management. The DST supports Research Information Management Systems (RIMS), which is a collaborative effort between a number of South African research institutions (HEIs and Science Councils) aimed at enhancing their research management capabilities. Information and reports collected from the system will enable government to formulate policies that will drive the National System of Innovation.
Let me close with a few words about patents.
The Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development (IPR-PFRD) Act sets up a system in which any research that has patent potential must be submitted to the university IPR Office and all intellectual property rights are ceded to the university.
If the university does not want to take a patent on the research, then the rights go to the government. The act requires any research that might conceivably at some stage be patentable, to be treated the same way. More, it requires all publications to be screened by the university IPR office before they can be published, just in case they might reveal something patentable.
In conclusion, may I say how impressed I am at the high level of speakers that Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) have managed to attract.
I trust these two days of work will prove fruitful and contribute to a collective reflection on “Knowing is not enough-engaging in the knowledge economy”.
Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
18 February 2010
Source: Department of Science and Technology (http://www.dst.gov.za/)
