The Antarctic Legacy of South Africa’s (ALSA) aim is to preserve and promote the legacy. Before the project started in 2009 many issues concerning the history, sociology, and influence of South Africa’s involvement in the Antarctic region lie largely frozen under a mountain of unsorted information, access. Since then the project made a large amount of documentation available on the open access digital repository. However, there is still a lot of material that needs to be mined and made available through the ALSA archive.
World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) is held on the first Thursday of every November. This year we celebrate all things digital preservation on 5th November 2020! With the theme ‘Digits: for Good,’ World Digital Preservation Day 2020 is an opportunity to connect the digital preservation community and celebrate the positive impact digital preservation has, for good – or at least for as long as required.
ALSA would like to thank all the contributors over the years and especially those in the past year. This year the collections of of Richard Skinner, Pat Condy , Valdon Smith and others have been added to the ALSA digital repository. A Collection of the South African Archives contributed through UCT has been added that cover material from before the 1800’s. A new collection of Teams has been added where all team images can be found. The 360 stitched images done by Anché Louw at SANAE IV in 2019 are now part of the archive.
If your collection is not part of the ALSA archive do contact us and make your CONTRIBUTION. Preserve your own legacy If you or your family, friends, colleagues, or acquaintances have or know about any material that can enrich the ALSA archive please contact us. The project aims to maintain an archive that is comprehensive of all South African Involvement in the Antarctic and Sub-Antarctic region. Therefore, ALSA would appreciate any contribution in this regard.
As soon as we received your mail/call, ALSA will contact you to verify the details and the material that you want to contribute to the archive. The whole process of getting the contribution to the archive will start. Contribution Process will start with establishing the contributor’s details, size of the collection and format of the material. It depends on the format of the material of how the process will go forward. If digitising needs to be done or if it has already been digitised. We would then need the contributor in helping us by identifying people and places on the images. As soon as metadata (identifying elements) have been approved by the archivist the collection will be added to the ALSA. We would also ask the contributor to write a paragraph(s) of his/her involvement in the Antarctic region. For a collection to be preserved for legacy purposes the project would like to know the story behind the person and how he/she got involved in the Antarctic environment. If a contributor does not wish to provide this information his/her collection will still be part of the archive, his story will just not have been told.
“IMPORTANT engage to make the archive sustainable and valuable”
If you come across any discrepancy and incorrect information, please notify us at. Please provide the URI – handle that will be shown when viewing the item. Then indicate the information that is incorrect and provide the correct information. It is important that you give us a verification as to the quality of your information before the project will change the information. A huge amount of images descriptions is not comprehensive and needed more information to enrich the quality of the entry. The project receives material form relatives, friends, family, and colleagues. The project is not able to identify all the people and features on these materials, but rather than not preserving them, we give general information as to what is identified on an image. If you come across any image that has not been identified fully, please send the information to us in the same way as with incorrect information.
