Since 2011, Africa Media Online has been involved in the digitisation of the
African National Congress Archives at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, Eastern Cape, South Africa. While the archive is largely paper-based, there is a significant audiovisual component. The longevity and size of the project has enabled
Africa Media Online to invest in technologies to capture material at the internationally accepted standards and also to innovate in the area of preservation of, and access to, the digital files. This paper will give insight into the innovations leveraged by Africa Media Online including digital preservation methodologies, the incorporation of an open source content management system (CMS), and the utilization of technologies developed as part of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). Africa Media Online has also developed an innovative platform for the outsourced capture of metadata for this and other digitisation projects in Africa that utilizes open standards and a thesaurus that we have been developing called the African Archival Thesaurus. Part of this initiative has been to build a community of volunteers around the platform called
Metadata for Africa that we are hoping will enable access to underfunded and endangered African heritage resources.
