For Immediate Release

June 14th, 2023

Contact: Elizabeth Robey
erobey@coherentdigital.net
781-361-0266

Africa Commons shortlisted for ALPSP “Impact” award

Africa Commons, a collaborative project to preserve and disseminate Africa’s endangered cultural heritage, has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious ALPSP Award for Impact in Publishing 2023. 

The newly introduced award celebrates significant initiatives, projects, or collaborations within scholarly communication and academic research that are making a positive difference. 

“We’re thrilled to be nominated for an award that focuses on making a positive impact and grateful to our university partners who have supported this project,” expressed Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President at Coherent Digital, the publisher of Africa Commons. “Congratulations to the other outstanding nominees."

Since its launch in November 2022, Africa Commons has quickly become the world's largest index of African digital archival materials, providing a centralized access point to over 600 organizations, 4,300 collections, and 400,000 documents scattered across the internet. With permission, copies are maintained, so that if items disappear, a backup copy is available. Free access to the index is provided to all institutions in Africa and to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). This enables African scholars and students to  find and access expressions of their heritage held in Western collections more easily, through digital repatriation.

Continuing its mission, Africa Commons partners with African institutions to digitize rare and at-risk materials, with one of their notable projects being the collection Black South African Magazines. Developed in collaboration with Africa-based production partner Sabinet, the collection includes 50,000 pages of extremely rare magazines, including the historically significant Drum and the first women's magazines written by and for Black African women. These materials have never before been digitized and have rarely been seen outside of Africa.

"We are really pleased to have received so many entries for both the brand new ALPSP Impact Award and the more well-known ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. As ever, the standard of applications was very high, and we extend our congratulations to all the finalists.” said David Sommer, Chair of ALPSP’s judging panel. 

The finalists will present their submissions to the judges in July and also will be invited to showcase their innovations to industry peers at the ALPSP Awards session, to be held Wednesday 13 September at the opening of the ALPSP Annual Conference and Awards 2023. 

About Coherent Digital

Coherent Digital was founded in 2019 by industry veterans Stephen Rhind-Tutt, Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence, Pete Ciuffetti, and others. Today, the scholarly record is incomplete, missing critical research materials that are currently wild—undiscoverable, uncatalogued, uncitable, and unstable. At Coherent Digital, we curate, capture, enrich, and make wild content available to scholars on our award-winning Commons platforms. We focus on grey literature, regional content, primary sources, and learning objects.