African Plants Initiative (API) and Herbarium HEID

Aluka is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. Our name, ‹Aluka›, is derived from a Zulu word meaning ‹to weave›,

Aluka seeks to attract high-quality scholarly content about Africa from institutions and individuals across the globe. By contributing their collections to the Aluka platform, content owners will have a means of offering access to their collections to an international audiencewithout having to develop and support their own technology platforms. Alukas web-based platform provides powerful tools for research, teaching, collaboration, and knowledge exchange.

The Aluka website includes a wide variety of high-quality scholarly materials contributed by Alukas partners, ranging from archival documents, periodicals, books, reports, manuscripts, and reference works, to three-dimensional models, maps, oral histories, plant specimens, photographs, and slides. By aggregating these materials online, the Aluka collections link materials that are widely dispersed and difficult to access, opening up new opportunities for research, teaching, and broader public discussion. One of Alukas primary objectives is to provide African scholars and students with access to scholarly materials originally from Africa, but now out of their reach.

Aluka also works closely with partner organisations in Africa to build capacity in digitisation and the use of online materials for teaching and research. In some cases this includes setting up digital labs and providing technical training in scanning and creating metadata records; in others, Aluka convenes training workshops for librarians, archivists, faculty, and heritage professionals on topics related to digital imaging, preservation, and the use of online tools in the classroom.

To demonstrate the potential of Aluka as a scholarly resource, three content areas are currently under development: African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes, African Plants Type Collection, and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa. New materials are added to the collections on an ongoing basis. In the longer run, our hope is that Alukas work in Africa will be a model for expanding the initiative to other regions of the developing world.

The African Plants content area comprises scientific data contributed by the African Plants Initiative (API) [e.g. HEIDELBERG], a collaboration among more than 50 institutions in Africa, Europe, and the United States. Partnering with Aluka, API's long-term goal is to build a comprehensive online research tool aggregating and linking presently scattered scholarly resources about African plants, thereby dramatically improving access for students, scholars, and scientists around the globe.

Each plant species in the African Plants digital library is represented by high-resolution digital images of type specimens provided by participating herbaria. When complete, the digital library will include images of more than 250 000 type specimens drawn from the estimated 60 000 plant species in Africa, Madagascar, and the other islands surrounding the African continent. A wide range of related images and data, including photographs, drawings, botanical art, field notes, and reference works, is also included. Examples of other resources include: The Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa, La Flore du Cameroun, Flowering Plants of South Africa, illustrations from Curtis's Botanical Magazine, individual botanists' slide collections, and selected archival materials such as David Livingstone's South Eastern Africa Expedition Papers.

By aggregating materials from such a broad array of sources and making them easily accessible online, the African Plants digital library will revolutionise research and teaching about African plants. As an example, in taxonomic research, access to type specimens is essential, but because most African type specimens are located outside of Africa, it is time-consuming and expensive for African scientists to conduct research. Not only does the availability of Aluka greatly reduce the need to travel to faraway herbaria to view type specimens, it also makes possible bringing together for the first time specimens from multiple herbaria, linked to other relevant scientific data. The ability to examine and compare specimens online will expose gaps in current knowledge, stimulate new research, and increase the use of taxonomic data for conservation and sustainable use, resulting in benefits of a possibly global nature. Because of its breadth, the African Plants content is useful not only to botanists, but also to students and scholars in many related academic disciplines, including ecology, ethnobotany, biology, natural products, anthropology, history, economic development, and environmental studies.

More about projects at COS Biodiversity and Plant Systematics.