Available since 1996, the «Memory of Africa» ​​project was born with the aim of providing information and collections about the region. Ten years later, and given the technological developments since then, the virtual library conceived by the consortium between the Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics of the University of Aveiro (DETI-UA), the Center for Studies on Africa and Development (CESA) of the Institute of Economics and Management (ISEG) and the Institute for Scientific and Tropical Research (IICT) – which ceased participation in 2001 – the project now opens doors to a new front, that of digital content.
Thus, in order to strengthen the material already available and continue to strengthen the ties between Portugal and Lusophone Africa, some works will be digitized, which brings together some implications, namely, the transfer of works, copyright, the costs of implementing the collections, among others.
In a statement, the University of Aveiro explains that it is part of the objectives of the project’s production team «to extend the process of collecting bibliographic references and digitizing works to collections located in the city of Goa (collections from colonial times), to develop the project» MĂłduloMemĂłria Brasil » and locate and collect references from collections in the old races of SĂŁo TomĂ© and PrĂncipe – currently the collection at the BibliotecaCentral is in progress «.
The same document also states that interventions should be carried out at the level of «computerization, training and collection of bibliographic references in the National Library of Mozambique» – having already collected more than 45 thousand references in the National Historical Archive of Maputo – and verify the existence of collections in Timor, Macau and Angola.
The combination of existing content in other regions of the country, outside Lisbon, Porto or Coimbra, is also part of the projects of this team that intends to translate the texts of the site into English in order to expand the scope of the project to other users who do not speak Portuguese.
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