ITOCA (Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa) is Africa's leading librarians training organization based in Africa.ITOCA is a capacity building organization aimed at enhancing information and communications technology (ICT) skills for African librarians,information specialists, scientists, researchers and students in Sub-Sahara Africa. Formerly, TEEAL Africa Office, ITOCA Albert R. Mann Library TEEAL programmefor Africa. The organization, which has professionals in 3 countries (Nigeria, Uganda, and Zimbabwe) and liaison contacts in 35 was established in Feb. 1999 as a marketing and support office for Cornell University's African countries, has trained over 1,000 information professionals,in 33 Sub-Sahara Africa countries in the last seven years.ITOCA , with backstopping from the TEEAL and AGORA projects at Mann Library (Cornell University) and FAO, the HINARI project at WHO and ORAE project at UNEP has a mandate to carry out outreach and training activities that promote the successful adoption and use of these three programs throughout Africa.

Ibadan University hosts 18th AGORA/HINARI National Workshop

Ibadan University in Oyo State was host to the 18th AGORA/HINARI National workshop for Nigeria from 26 -29 June, 2007. The ITOCA team has been on the road conducting the Training of Training workshops in AGORA and HINARI since beginning of 2005 and the journey has seen the team through Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Ghana, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mozambique, Senegal, Mali, Zambia and Lesotho. The workshops bring together 25-30 participants from various institutions and equip participants with necessary skills to fully utilize these programs as well as other resources available over the internet and how to market and cascade the training. The Training of Trainer approach is proving to be paying dividends as over 5000 participants have been trained downstream.

The Ibadan workshop brought together a total of 31 participants from 22 institutions . Marcus Banks a member of Librarians Without Borders- an MLA Global Initiative (Co-funders of the workshop) had this comment about the workshop.

“Overall, I think it is excellent. The modules all flow logically into one another, and there is excellent documentation and many exercises to reinforce skills.

Great job everyone!!”

Building a user community in Africa: ‘HINAGOA' users forum

The Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa (ITOCA) and its partners are implementing a HIN-AG-OA Users Forum. HINARI, AGORA and OARE programmes (HIN-AG-OA) were developed to answer the need to improve access to up-to-date scientific scholarly literature in biomedical, health sciences, agriculture, environmental sciences and related fields for scientists, researchers and information managers in low income countries. The launch of HINARI led by WHO in collaboration with the publishers and Yale University, in January 2002 was prompted by the research and teaching needs of the user community in the developing countries particularly in South Asia, Latin America and Sub-Sahara Africa, many who had not had access to journals for many years and worked with outdated technologies due to lack of access to recent scholarly journals. AGORA and OARE programmes launched in 2003 and 2006 respectively have been developed along the lines and address similar needs with focus in agriculture and the environment. From the onset, the three initiatives, sought to provide the users, one of the important stakeholders in the programmes, ‘a voice' in the on-going and future developments of HIN-AG-OA in order to ensure the programmes address the real needs of the users in Africa.

Project goals:

• To identify and mobilize HINAGOA users in Africa and create a formal forum of users that support for the programmes development.
• To network and influence the formation of user chapters in each of the initially selected ten African countries.
• To document the lessons from the project with the aim of expanding the initiative throughout the eligible countries in Africa and replicating the model through out other regions of the world.

This is an invitation to join the user community in Africa of AGORA, HINARI AND OARE Programmes.

The goals of the HIN-AG-OA User Forum are:

• Network and share information and experiences as a HINAGOA user
• Keep abreast of what's going in your field and learn about breakthroughs in e-resource access and     management  through the HIN-AG-OA gateways
• Collectively provide feedback to the programmes and help shape the future of HIN-AG-OA
• Organize and attend HIN-AG-OA training sessions to update your skills 
• As a member you will receive and have access to:
  • The ITOCA Quarterly E-newsletter and the HIN-AG-OA annual e-newsletter.
  • The HIN-AG-OA user community listserv. 

The HIN-AG-OA user forum will launched at the end of August 2007.

If you would like to be part of this User Community please register by sending in your full name; email address; work designation and address to: christine@itoca.org

Are you accessing Soil health Information?

"ITOCA (Information Training and Outreach Centre for Africa) and CIIFAD (Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development) are working on a survey to make it easier and more cost-effective for those in Africa to find and obtain information on "soil health”. The survey results will be used to figure out the easiest ways for one to locate and obtain the information they need using the communication tools available to them.

A survey questionnaire was sent out to soil scientists and respondents were automatically entered into a draw for a book and flash disks. The following respondents won the prizes

Book winner, "Biological Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems" by Norman Uphoff...et al. Congratulations to Helen Wangechi, Assistant Research Officer, TSBF-CIAT, Kenya.

IGB Flash drives, Congratulations to Nerisa Kamar, Research Librarian, Egerton University, Kenya and Tegwe Soko, Plant Breeder, Crop Breeding Institute, Zimbabwe.

Dr Jalloh Lives up to expectations!

When participants are invited to take part in the HINARI/AGORA Training of Trainer workshops it is hoped that true to their word they will be in a position to go back to their institutions and train others. The ITOCA follow-up programme on trainees shows that around 65% actually train others after the attending the workshops. There has been good success stories on the cascading effect of the ITOCA workshops through-out Sub-Saharan African and the latest success story comes from Senegal where Dr Mohammed Jalloh of the Hôpital Général de Grand Yoff (HOGGY) held yet another successful training for his fellow physicians.

On 23rd August 2007, Dr Jalloh conducted a one day training session for 17 Physicians and 1 chief nurse from 3 hospitals. Dr Jalloh says that he enjoys teaching his colleagues and making sure that they also have access to the “good quality scientific resources” available through HINARI. To deliver the training he used our new “HINARI Short Course” which you can also use if you have limited training time. To get a copy of the HINARI Short Course you can send an email to Lenny Rhine at rhinel@ufl.edu or Vimbai Hungwe at Vimbai@itoca.org or go to the training materials available on the HINARI website (short course still to be posted). Dr Jalloh is continuing with his training and his next target includes, residents, Nurses and chief nurses and more physicians from other hospitals.

HINARI/ AGORA/ OARE Title lists keep growing

The list of journal titles for AGORA, HINARI and OARE keep growing as more partner publishers join the fight to bridge the information gap between developing and developed countries. The collection of full text online journals accessed through these programs continues to grow in leaps and bounds with AGORA currently at 1132, HINARI at over 3770 titles and 2035 for OARE. The scholarship available through these programs equates accessing institutions to only the wealthiest universities in the world in terms of accessing latest quality information. Many institutions are taking advantage of these initiatives with current registrations in Africa at 466 institutions for AGORA, 867 for HINARI and 375 for OARE

Do you remember having to use loprovhinari [sb] or free full text [sb] combined with your search and how we had to write them on pieces of paper for future use? All that is no more, thanks to “myncbishare=” which now activates the HINARI icon and filter and a free full text filter tab. What this means is that, when you do your search in PubMed you will automatically see which articles are available through HINARI and which ones are free full text.

TEEAL
TEEAL (The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library) program www.teeal.org is an innovative scholarly scientific database developed specifically for agricultural and natural resource scientists, lecturers and students in developing countries by Cornell University in association with the Rockefeller Foundation, NY, USA. TEEAL, available on CD-ROM and on a hard disk that can be put on your Local Area Network, gives access to full-text literature from the world's leading publishers.

AGORA
AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture) is an online program http://www.aginternetwork.org/ that gives educational, government departments and not-for-profit organizations, in selected developing countries instant online access to over 900 journals in agriculture and related sciences for free. Led by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in collaboration with Cornell University, WHO and the Rockefeller Foundation, the goal of AGORA is to increase the quality and effectiveness of agricultural research and training in low-income countries, and in turn, to improve food security. Researchers, policy-makers, educators, students, technical workers and extension specialists now have access to high-quality, relevant and timely agricultural information via the Internet.

HINARI
The Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) www.who.int/hinari is part of the United Nation's Health InterNetwork (HIN) project, and is coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the lead agency. It is a collaboration between the WHO, publishers and other health care content owners intended to provide biomedical and health care research and guideline information to non profit academic and research institutions, governmental and policy making departments in low income countries. Access to this information will generally be provided at low cost or in most cases free by the Publisher, to institutions in many countries with a Gross National Product (GNP) per capita of US $1,000 or less according to the World Bank Report, December 1999.

OARE
Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) http://www.oaresciences.org/ an international public-private consortium coordinated by by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Yale University, and leading science and technology publishers, enables developing countries to gain free access to one of the world's largest collections of environmental science literature. Over one thousand scientific journal titles owned and published by over 200 prestigious publishing houses, scholarly societies, and scientific associations are now available in 70 low income countries. Another 36 countries will be added by 2008. Research is provided in a wide range of disciplines, including biotechnology, botany, climate change, ecology, energy, environmental chemistry, environmental economics, environmental engineering and planning, environmental law and policy, environmental toxicology and pollution, geography, geology, hydrology, meteorology, oceanography, urban planning, zoology, and many others.

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