The University of North Texas Libraries’ Dean’s Innovation Grant, formerly known as the Green Light To Greatness Award, provides funding to research and projects within the UNT Libraries that promote scholarship and contribute to the gathering of knowledge that helps improve our libraries, our university, and the community.

Dean’s Innovation Grant 2014 Awardees

Daniel Alemneh, Mark Phillips

Project Title

Expanding UNT’s Digital Libraries Reach to Africa: Facilitating Collaboration between Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) and UNT via Digital Projects

Project Description

UNT prides itself on its diversity and its cooperation with international students and organizations. The UNT Libraries collaborated with Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia to explore the feasibility and implementation of online education and digital libraries at AAU.

At the heart of this project was the desire to follow up on the digital libraries at AAU and see how they could integrate certain digital library efforts for the Ethiopian campus. The main projects on the table are The Portal to Texas History Model, the building of a storage facility for storing digital materials that would be optimized for the East African climate, and promoting open access for educational institutions in the region.

Contributor Biographies

Daniel Alemneh, Ph.D. is the Supervisor for the Digital Curation Unit. He has a Ph.D. in Information Science and a post-master’s degree in digital imaging from UNT and a Master of Library Science from the University of Sheffield in the UK. His bachelor’s degree was in library and information science from the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

Mark Phillips is the Assistant Dean for Digital Libraries. He received his Master of Library Science from UNT.