Abstract:
African and other developing countries face problems of making their scholarly output
widely visible and accessible. This is partly attributed to the fact that most scholarly
output from this part of the world is documented in low circulating journals and grey
literature in print format. Information and communication technologies (lCTs) have
been acknowledged to have the potential to reduce that problem. A study was conducted
to examine the extent of lCT application by Inter University Council for East Africa
(IUCEA) member institutions in documenting and disseminating scholarly output.
The research involved 28 (10 private and 18 public) institutions selected from among
67 IUCEA member institutions from Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ugandaduring the 200912010 academic year.A combination of approaches including face-to-face
interviews, self-administered questionnaires, and analysis of institutional web-sites were
used for data gathering. Sixty-one respondents (14 deputy vice chancellors/vice rectors,
22 directors of research and 24 directorslheads of institutional libraries) participated in
the study. Content analysis was adopted for analysing data from open ended questions
whereas data from structured questions was analysed using the Statistical Package for
the Social Sciences (SPSS) VI6 software. It was established that most institutions in the
region were still documenting and disseminating their scholarly output using conventional
methods with little exploitation of ICTs. The study recommends the need for the IUCEA
and its member institutions to spearhead effective exploitation of ICT developments to
facilitate the documentation and dissemination of scholarly output among researchers in
the East Africa region and beyond.
