• Heritage digitization offers
• On site digitization

Headquartered in Dakar, Senegal, the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) is a pan African institution. Established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1962. The IDEP library in Dakar is the sole repository of the Institute’s paper documents. This naturally poses a problem for the 54 African member countries that want to access this unique body of knowledge.

Before starting any digital preservation of these unique documents, IDEP had to define the scope of the project. A preparatory stage had already identified – quantitatively and qualitatively – which documents needed to be digitised. IDEP wanted the digitisation to be carried out on site, so it could continue offering its visitors access to the original documents. This also allowed the creation of local employment.

The first phase, which covered 260 000 pages, was completed in 6 months. An analysis of this phase made it possible to define the optimal production model, both in terms of quality and quantity, which was implemented for the second phase. Digitising the documents also created additional storage space for the physical archiving of future IDEP publications.