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Beaven Tapureta Own Correspondent
The world over, the e-book is revolutionising reading cultures despite it being seen sometimes as an enemy to the traditional physical book. In Africa, the uptake of electronic resources such as the e-book may be slow due to infrastructural impediments but the understanding and promotion of its value is increasing. At a Zimbabwe University Libraries Consortium (ZULC) workshop which took place in Harare on Tuesday to empower university librarians with skills and information in how to access and use electronic resources, the strong will to learn this new technology was evident. The hands-on workshop, held in the well-equipped computer lab at Midlands State University (Harare Campus), was facilitated by US-based company ProQuest EBook Central which specialises in providing e-books for libraries and researchers around the globe.

Ola Agboola of ProQuest equipped participants with the knowledge on how to navigate the ProQuest Ebook Central interface and also talked about information literacy, legal and copyright issues related to the e-book.

He simplified the terminology and demonstrated how one can search, sort the search results, save them in the bookshelf, download or print from ProQuest. The learning of all these skills and more of them was made easy by the availability of internet in the computer lab. Each participant had a connected computer to work with.

Speaking to this writer after the workshop, Agboola said that he hoped in the next few months users, particularly academics in Zimbabwe, will start seeing the benefits of embracing e-book providers such as ProQuest.

“The e-book is very topical across the world and I am quite pleased that many of the users of ProQuest are from Zimbabwe,” he said.

Bindura University of Science and Technology librarian Audrey Mhlanga, who also leads the ZULC marketing and advocacy workgroup, said the consortium normally holds four or five workshops of this kind in a year and she hoped that the librarians who have been trained by Agboola will further market the e-book in their institutions so that it is used effectively.

She said government can also assist universities in the acquisition of more e-book resources.

Attending the workshop was also Jessica Porter, ProQuest’s Accounts Manager in Sub-Saharan Africa, who said that although the e-book is a powerful resource for academic researchers, the print book is here to stay but that does not pose any possibility of conflict between the two. She saw the e-book as simply complementing the print book.

“There is something romantic about the print book. Its physical feel and appearanc . . . However, many people are seeing the benefits of using e-books. In Africa, the only existing challenges are internet connectivity and infrastructure,” she said.

That government indeed has a role to play in making electronic resources available to many people was also echoed by Edwin Madziwo who is the Manager of Library and Information Services at the Zimbabwe Open University.

Madziwo said that workshops like this equip universities and colleges in Zimbabwe to move the STEM agenda forward because latest e-books which the country has access to are the same latest e-books that leading universities the world over are accessing.

One of the participants Mildred Gwangu, a librarian at the Zimbabwe Ezekiel Guti University, saw the workshop as an eye-opener and relevant because many university students nowadays have a flair for electronic gadgets. They can access the academic resources on their mobile phones and tablets but they need training, she said.

Librarians who attended the workshop were drawn from academic institutions affiliated to ZULC such as Bindura University of Science and Technology, Zimbabwe Open University, Africa University, Women University in Africa, Lupane State University, Bulawayo Polytechnic and others.

ProQuest Ebook Central, winner of Best Interface in the 2015 Charleston Advisor Reader’s Choice Awards, is one of the multi-disciplinary e-book providers which the libraries consortium subscribes to annually.