This blog is co-authored by Folasade Adepoju, Chief Librarian at the National Library of Nigeria, and Ima Oduok, Assistant Digital Preservation Analyst at the Rockefeller Archive Center.
Across our field, we are facing decreasing resources and increasing risk to our digital materials. It is important to remember how this danger to digital heritage can reinforce and broaden existing inequities. It is also important to highlight the information and cultural heritage professionals doing incredible work in their local communities, promoting preservation of indigenous knowledge and traditions. To this end, I want to share an interview with a friend, Folasade Adepoju, who is leading efforts in digital preservation and web archiving in Nigeria and collaborating across the African continent.
Ima Oduok:
Hi Folasade, thank you for taking the time to share your insights for the World Digital Preservation Day blog post. To start us off, everyone’s journey into digital preservation is unique. Could you tell us about the founding of YILCO (Youth Initiative for Literacy and Cultural Orientation), and the preservation needs it seeks to serve?
Folasade Adepoju:
My journey into digital preservation is not by accident. I work as a public services librarian at the National Library of Nigeria, and I have seen first-hand the smiles of satisfaction on the faces of lawyers and members of public who walk in for certified true copies of old newspapers for litigation purposes, change-of-name purposes, and others. I also complement the work of teachers and lecturers of Library and Information Science in teaching media and information literacy in secondary and tertiary institutions around Abuja and its environ.
Often times, I have come across online conversations being used for revisionist, distortive, and denialist purposes. Because most of our cultural heritage are in physical form, it was always hard to debunk their submissions. Thus, the motivation to have a non-profit organisation to preserve both our physical and fragile digital cultural memory and heritage came from attending iPres 2024 in Ghent. After seeing organisations and individuals’ effort in preserving their digital heritage, I decided to start one to bridge this gap in Nigeria.
Observing the massive digital footprints and cultural memory being lost in real-time across our communities prompted me to do something, no matter how small. As someone passionate about libraries, history, truth, and cultural sustainability, I realized that digital preservation should sit in the front coach for us in Nigeria's information and memory ecosystem. It is an urgent necessity to safeguard our history, institutional knowledge, and digital heritage from sudden link rot, platform obsolescence, and physical or institutional neglect.
YILCO seeks to serve the growing need for training on structured archiving practices, ensuring that native narratives, research, and cultural memories remain accessible to future generations.
IO:
What motivated you to initiate a web archiving fellowship across Africa, and what are the primary goals for this first cohort of fellows?
FA:
What motivated the creation of the Web Archiving Fellowship was the gap in localized digital and web archiving trainings and action on the continent. Most of the knowledge we hold about web archiving was purely theoretical and classroom knowledge.
In the internet age, some of Africa's history, policy documents, narratives, and academic outputs are born and now live exclusively online and are vulnerable to disappearing overnight. I have experienced this often times with 404 error messages or pages being moved, especially on government and institutional websites.
So, the primary goals for this first cohort of fellows are to build localized capacity, hands-on technical skills, and a vibrant community of practice. We aim to empower information professionals to actively capture, curate, and preserve web pages unique to their regions, establishing a strong foundation for sustainable African web archiving networks.
IO:
What are the biggest challenges facing digital preservation and web archiving work in Nigeria? Do you see these same challenges being faced in other countries across Africa?
FA:
The road to sustainable digital preservation comes with obstacles, especially in Africa. I will share these issues as a Nigerian librarian. I am very sure we share similar fate with fellow information workers across the continent.
Infrastructural deficits: Unreliable electricity supply, high internet data cost, and large-scale data storage heavily impede continuous web harvesting.
Awareness and Policy Gaps: There is a lack of institutional policy frameworks and the absent in the act that established the National Library of Nigeria mandating born-digital legal deposit in the organisation, compounded by low awareness among key stakeholders.
Technical Expertise: Specialized technical trainings in digital curation, tools, and preservation remain scarce.
Beyond these, we also face bureaucracy, funding cuts, and static academic curricula. These challenges are not limited to Nigeria, many countries across Africa share similar infrastructural, financial, and regulatory bottlenecks in safeguarding their digital assets.
IO:
How can others contribute and get involved with YILCO's work?
FA:
We firmly believe that digital preservation is a collective responsibility. There are several ways professionals, enthusiasts, and institutions can partner with us. They can volunteer and collaborate by bringing their skills in capacity building, advocacy, IT support, or research to our upcoming events and projects.
My special appreciation goes to the following individuals and organisations:
Camille Lawrence, Prof. Dan Noonan, Sean Macmillan, Gladys Kemboi, Ima Oduok, Abraham Solomon, Webrecorder, Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), DPOE-N, and Margot Note. They have supported our work by giving their time to teach, develop tools, produce toolkits and blog posts that have shaped deeper understanding of archiving and digital preservation.
IO:
Thank you so much for sharing your perspective, Folasade!
FA:
Thank you, Ima.