Contrary to popular perceptions, academic libraries are not only depositories of books, journals, newspapers and other popular scholarly publications, but they are stewards and custodians of heritage and memory not just of the institutions, but also of the broader communities. At Stellenbosch University, this is reflected through the Library and Information Service’s digital preservation repository, SUNDigital.
SUNDigital Collections was established in 2013 and hosts historical documents, cultural artefacts, images, music collections, indigenous knowledge collections and finding aids for these collections to increase the visibility of special and unique collections held by the library, and for posterity.
Use of the repository is tracked and shows approximately 40,000 to 50,000 visits per annum and approximately 20,000 to 40,000 downloads per annum from all continents of the world, demonstrating wider and deeper impacts. Visits and downloads can be used as a proxy for determining the reach and engagement of scholarly outputs.
Research or scholarly impact, on the other hand, is often determined through counting the number of scholarly outputs and by analysing citations from such outputs.
As an example, one of the collections hosted in SUNDigital is the Zuid-Afrikaan, a nineteenth-century Dutch language newspaper based in Cape Town that circulated throughout the Cape Colony, published between 1830 and 1930, which we digitised and uploaded to SUNDigital Collections in 2013.
Among the publications that have resulted from accessing this collection are the research articles ‘Creating the Cape Colony runaway advertisements datasets, 1830-1842’ by Karl Bergemann (2025) in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (https://doi.org/10.14321/jsdp.6.1.0001), De Zuid-Afrikaan en die teenstrydighede van 19de-eeuse Kaapse liberalisme by G Botma, 2022 in Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe (https://doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2022/v62n1a5) and book chapter “Advertising the enslaved for sale: a quantitative approach to the Zuid-Afrikaan”, 2023 by Raaijmakers and Ekama in Quantitative history and uncharted people: Case studies from the South African past. These three publications have in turn garnered 7 citations on Google Scholar to date.
This is just one example of how the library impacts not only the academy but society at large by making unique information resources that would otherwise not be available anywhere else accessible online without charging a fee.
Please contact Mimi Seyffert-Wirth for more information.