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.

LanTEEAL 2.0 – bigger, better, and faster!

We are launching a brand-new version of LanTEEAL with the 2006 update, which includes an overhauled interface and improved search capabilities. LanTEEAL 2.0 runs in a browser window, and for networks running Windows Server, there are no limitations to the number of simultaneous users!

Access the same quality full-text scientific literature, but with a look and feel more closely resembling your favorite research databases such as EBSCO and ISI Web of Science.

The interface is intuitive and easy-to-use – although of course there will be a full help section included. Furthermore, all articles in the 1993-2006 collection are now PDFs for easy opening, viewing, and printing.

All subscribers ordering the 2006 update will receive an entirely new hard drive loaded with the entire database at no extra charge. Our new hard drives are smaller AND have more capacity, so there's no worry about running out of space with future updates.

The expected launch date for the new software is mid-February 2008.

ITOCA conducting Tertiary Agricultural Education (TAE) Institutional Survey

ITOCA is currently conducting interviews on behalf of a major international foundation with significant grant-making activities in agricultural development. We are carrying out an assessment to understand the current status and role of Tertiary Agricultural Education (TAE), research and extension within all Sub Sahara Africa countries. The aim of the initiative is to assess the gaps, challenges and opportunities in improving the agricultural productivity for small holder farmers and to understand ways in which these activities could be strengthened. Our findings will help to inform the future work of the Foundation in the region.

To date ITOCA has interviewed over 300 professionals from about 100 TAE, research and extension institutions in 20 Sub Sahara African countries. The data collected and findings will be published on a new portal for TAE in Africa set for launch July 2008. The TAE-Africa portal is aimed at informing further investment into human capital and institutional development in TAE in the region and policy makers, development organizations, academic and research organizations will benefit from the portal.

121 Trainers trained in 2007

In 2007, ITOCA managed to conduct four national workshops in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Nigeria and Tanzania. The workshops brought together a total of 121 participants from 82 institutions which included, training hospitals, national agricultural research institutions, health research institutions, and institutions of higher learning. In the past years the downstream training effect has been around 65% and this is expected to be even higher as evidence is already showing that more and more training is happening on the ground as reflected in the feedback reports of the trained participants.

The workshop model developed in 2004 has continued to be robust and appropriate for the audience. ITOCA continually updates and modifies the content inline with new improved developments and the platform for delivery (PowerPoint presentations interspersed with hands-on exercises) remain appropriate. Incorporating feedback from participants the workshop duration has been extended from 3 to 4 days. The overall comments from participants show that the short, in-depth, hands-on , and face-to-face approach is an effective way of maximizing usage of electronic resources.

More training workshops are being planned for 2008 and the training calendar is available from http://www.itoca.org/

HINAGOA User Forum kicks-off on a high note!

The HINAGOA user forum kicked off on a very high note with a lot of users and interested parties joining the forum. The past month has been left for the users of the forum to introduce themselves and get a feel of who is where and doing what in the forum. Its encouraging that already there has been some networking among the participants which is one of the objectives of the forum. Beginning of 2008 will see the introduction of themes for discussion by forum participants .
The goals of the forum are to:

• identify and mobilize HINAGOA users in Africa and create a formal forum of users that support the programmes' development.
• network and influence the formation of user chapters in each of the initially selected ten African countries.
• 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.
  

Since my AGORA/HINARI training I have been able to do some training at my institution. As part of our HIV training programme, we have a literature search session where I have had the opportunity to train participants in online literature searches and full text retrieval. Essentially I conduct training on how to search and retrieve full text biomedical literature using HINARI through PubMed, Cochrane library, POPLINE. I also take the participants through ELDIS and search engines like Google scholar and Google itself and then advise them to use HINARI to access the full texts if necessary.

Since my Training in April, I have trained a total of 114 as below.

If you would also like to give us feebback on your training sessions and the problems you are facing please send an email to itoca@itoca.org

What they said about HINARI/ AGORA/OARE and Training Workshops in 2007

My Institution and I have benefited a lot from your training in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) which was conducted in the mid of September 2007.
Basically I attended the Training and eventually transfered the acquired knowledge and skills to our users.
I have to congratulate you all facilitators, for your recommendable good work, and hope all the stakeholders in this initiatives will keep on enhancing this programme.

James Ndege
Librarian
Tanzania Food and Drugs Authority

I have just completed (this morning)a 9.00 am - 12.00 pm training session with 28 students of our Masters in Public Health Leadership and Save the Mothers programme including 1 of their staff. It was enlightening to them and they were delighted, "I have learned something new today", one of them said. Many expressed appreciation of the new found treasure of knowledge, and especially for the fact that it is free.

David Bukenya
Uganda Christian University Library

This was a very fruitful workshop and it will have a positive impact on my work. More of such workshops should be held through-out Africa so that researchers can benefit from these invaluable resources

Wilson Yule
Researcher/Writer
Southern Africa Research and Documentation Centre -(SARDC) - Zimbabwe

HINARI Journals access rights

We would like to bring to the attention of our HINARI users that within the HINARI framework, publishers are entitled to choose what titles to include and what not to include in countries where they have significant business or local sales agents. We urge you to please read the Publishers' Statement on the HINARI website (http://www.who.int/hinari/statementofintent/en/ ) and pay particular attention to bullet 5. Currently HINARI offers over 3700 titles and even when a publisher does not give you access to their journals, your country will still have significant access . If for example publisher X contributes 150 journals to HINARI and due to significant business in country Y they don't give access to their titles, Country Y will still access more than 3400 titles free through HINARI.

Please take note that having problems accessing any full text does not necessarily mean you don't have access rights. Should you have problems accessing any journal please do not hesitate sending an email to hinari@who.int or itoca@itoca.org

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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