EDUBASE - A bibliography of education for Black South Africans

04 Oct 2018
04 Oct 2018

Original EDUBASE printout

The original EDUBASE printout was digitised by Digital Library Services.

ZivaHub celebrates its first case study which explores the EDUBASE collection, a decades-long, multi-format bibliography of research on education for Black South Africans, containing content stretching from 1806 to 1992, and the process of making this collection openly available.

EDUBASE is a database of educational information relating to the field of black education in South Africa, covering the period from the nineteenth century to 1992. The resources curated by the EDUBASE collection including books and book chapters, journal articles, conference papers and presentations, white papers and other forms of governmental and civil society documents. In total, EDUBASE includes nearly 9000 publications on the topic of education for black South Africans. A separate database inspired by EDUBASE focusing specifically on education in the Transkei was produced by David Hiscock, and has been added to this collection.

The database was originally located on UCT's servers. Over time, it migrated formats several times, from floppy disks to stiffy disks, then to CD-ROMs, a flashdrive, and finally to cloud-based storage provided here on ZivaHub. The School of Education at UCT kindly allocated space for the project up to 1992, and the physical collection now resides at UCT Libraries Special Collections, as the 'BC1584 Edubase Collection'.

This collection consists of the database files in MS Access format (EDUBASE_Kallaway.mdb and EDUBASE_Hiscock_Transkei.mbd), along with a list of keywords in .csv format, and a set of instructions on how to navigate the databases as a PDF. The database itself is searchable by keyword, author or date of publication. Open versions of both databases have also been added in .csv format.

The funding for the project was made possible by the authors of Apartheid and Education who agreed to donate their share of the royalties to a fund that was established for this purpose. Various people have worked on the EDUBASE over the years, including Jackie Kallaway, Deirdre Birch, Vera Hulley, David Hiscock and Debbie Sheward. Many thanks to them for making possible the development this invaluable tool for the advancement of research in this important area.
 
Thanks also go to Gary November of the UCT Digitisation unit, who digitised the cover of the original EDUBASE printout; Adrianna Pinska and Corne Oosthuizen for their support in migrating the content from the .mdb files to open .csv spreadsheets.

The references fields below contain links to Dr Peter Kallaway’s other publications on education for Black South Africans.

References

This article originally appeared in ZivaHub on the 19 September 2018. Photo supplied by Digital Library Services.