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Corporation News
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Carnegie Corporation of New York
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Carnegie Corporation President
And Board Chair Dedicate New South African Libraries
$10 Million Investment
in New National, City Libraries and Multi-University Research Portal
Key to Advancing Knowledge, Building Community. Grand Openings celebrated.
New York, NY and Cape Town, South Africa, July 30, 2008
– Carnegie Corporation of New York President Vartan Gregorian
and Thomas H. Kean, Chairman of the Corporation’s Board of
Trustees joined South African leaders to dedicate new Carnegie Corporation-funded
model libraries in Pretoria and Cape Town. Leaders from prominent
South African universities also teamed with the U.S. foundation
leaders to inaugurate the opening of a multi-campus electronic research
consortium. The foundation has invested more than $10 million since
2004—including a new grant of $2.5 million—to revitalize
the country’s public library system.
In dedicating the libraries, Vartan Gregorian said, "The library
may be the single institution that best represents South Africa’s
open society. No matter what form they take, libraries have become
indispensable to the advancement of South Africa’s people
and to the development of their democracy. South Africa’s
libraries are also helping to preserve and provide access to the
country’s rich cultural and intellectual patrimony.”
From 1981-1989, Gregorian served as President of the New York Public
Library, an institution with a network of four research libraries
and 83 circulating libraries.
“South Africa is redefining the very concept of municipal
libraries in response to the day-to-day needs of the people,”
said Thomas H. Kean. “Today’s community libraries emphasize
the basic aspirations of the vast majority of South Africans and
help to meet those needs.”
Former
New Jersey Governor Kean continued, “South Africans can now
look to the National Library as an institution committed to protecting
and preserving the rich national heritage of all South Africans.
Since 1994—following centuries of colonialism and apartheid—officials
at the National Library have rededicated the system to focus on
cataloguing and preserving literature, artifacts and other materials
relating to the history of the nation's entire population in each
of the country’s 11 official languages.”
The
foundation’s library work reflects the importance of public
libraries in the South African context where they serve as important
and powerful levers of societal change. Funding focuses on fostering
the development of literacy programs; strengthening linkages between
education and library systems; promoting continuing education and
adult learning; and bridging the digital divide.
Initiatives
carried out by the South African government over the past decade
have led to a dramatic increase in primary school enrollment. Yet
access to books—an indispensable tool for literacy education—remains
limited as many of the country’s schools do not possess libraries.
Thus, libraries—especially local libraries—in South
Africa are a critical element of the primary and secondary education
system.
National
Library of South Africa (Grand Opening in Pretoria, August 1)
A 2005 Carnegie Corporation grant of more than $2 million to the
National Library of South
Africa (NLSA) has accelerated the institution’s transformation
including the construction of a new facility at its Pretoria campus,
whose grand opening will be celebrated on Friday, August 1. The
foundation’s funds helped to leverage a government commitment
of more than $26 million for the site’s rebuilding and remodeling.
The Carnegie Corporation grant funds are being used to increase
access to the Internet and to catalogue and provide access to large
segments of the previously un-catalogued collection. The NLSA will
also use Corporation funds to purchase materials published by South
Africans locally and abroad, thereby building the collection of
contemporary indigenous fiction and nonfiction in all 11 official
South African languages.
One
of the NLSA’s primary goals, underwritten by the Corporation,
is an effort to collect and rediscover aspects of African literature
as well as artifacts and other materials that were often marginalized
under the colonial and apartheid governments, including works in
indigenous languages. In cooperation with other African countries,
South African librarians have begun to assemble an important and
wide-ranging collection.
“The
new National Library offers nourishment to the country’s citizenry
by providing access to South Africa’s national heritage, its
record of triumphs and failures, and the rich lode of South Africa’s
intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements,” said
Vartan Gregorian. “South Africa’s public libraries contain
the nation’s collective memory. They are not repositories
of human endeavor alone—they are instruments of civilization
that provide tools for learning, understanding and progress.”
John Tsebe, the National Librarian of South Africa, said, “The
National Library must lead the way in revitalizing libraries in
South Africa because libraries are essential to the nation's socioeconomic
development. Our view is that the more people read, the more they
become enlightened, the more employable they are and the more jobs
they can create.”
City
Library of Cape Town (Grand Opening July 29)
Grants from Carnegie Corporation totaling more than $4.5 million
will help fund the construction of the City
Library of Cape Town’s new facility in a renovated, historically
significant building known as the Old Drill Hall. The library’s
collection is split up and spread out in a municipal building not
originally intended to house a library. The move to the new facility
will be completed in August 2009.
In
an event held yesterday, Cape Town’s Mayor, Helen Zille officially
opened the library with the promise that it would be open as a Centre
of Excellence to the citizens of Cape Town on 1 September 2008.
Like
many municipal libraries in South Africa, the City Library’s
central facility will serve many functions—all aimed at advancing
education and providing access to information to help communities
make more informed decisions.
In addition to extending the library’s reference collection—available
to each of the system’s 98 branches—Carnegie Corporation
funding is being used by the City Library’s central facility
to offer Internet connectivity and study space with literacy and
educational support materials. Funds have also been allocated for
staff training to help users more easily identify and access important
government-supplied information.
University
Library Web-Based Research Commons
(Grand Opening at UCT, July 30)
Three of South Africa’s premier institutions of higher education
have joined to develop a library portal connecting researchers to
each university’s information database as well as to important
international scholarly journals. This research commons will be
managed by the University of Cape
Town but equally shared among the universities of Cape Town,
Witwatersrand and KwaZulu-Natal.
A ceremonial opening will be celebrated on Wednesday, July 30 at
the University of Cape Town.
By
significantly upgrading the quality and broadening the reach of
the country’s university-based research enterprise, Carnegie
Corporation’s $2.5 million grant to the three-university consortium
responds to a government imperative to increase the production of
doctoral graduates.
The research commons will facilitate the transition to a new generation
of researchers by equipping them with the most up to date research
tools and methods. A new cadre of young mostly black academics will
benefit from access to the research commons as they initiate their
careers and begin to publish. By cultivating this new cadre of academics,
the universities will add to the nations’ considerable store
of intellectual wealth as well as gradually replacing a generation
of aging, predominantly white male researchers who have begun to
retire.
The universities have developed, and are now piloting, an integrated
electronic research system that connects researchers to aggregated
information, provides collaborative computing capabilities and links
researchers according to their interests and expertise. The research
commons will include access to a rich lode of Africa-oriented digital
content from both new and well-known sources.
Support
for trained and qualified research librarians staffing the research
commons as well as dedicated, fully equipped electronic research
space at each of the three universities is also being funded by
the Carnegie Corporation grant.
About
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Carnegie Corporation of New York was created by Andrew Carnegie
in 1911 to promote "the advancement and diffusion of knowledge
and understanding." For more than 95 years the Corporation
has carried out Carnegie's vision of philanthropy by building on
his two major concerns: international peace and advancing education
and knowledge. As a private grantmaking foundation, the Corporation
will invest more than $100 million this year in nonprofits to fulfill
Mr. Carnegie's mission, "to do real and permanent good in this
world." The Corporation's capital fund, originally donated
at a value of about $135 million, had a market value of $3 billion
on September 30, 2007.
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