Copyrights & data (re)use

We contacted the publishers of the newspapers and private archive owners to present the project and explain its scholarly value. As copyright holders or licensees with the authority to grant copyright permission, they had to sign a "Digital Distribution Agreement" authorising the ZMO and the other institutional partners in the project to digitise, distribute and archive the identified titles for educational and non-profit purposes via the Internet for an indefinite period of time. In cases where some copyright holders refused (or have not yet given permission), the detailed metadata of these sources (without the full text and scan) has been published to improve discovery and facilitate archival research.

In the case of "orphan works" - materials whose rights holders are unlocatable or unidentifiable, we have relied on "fair use". The documents can therefore be made available for educational and non-profit purposes, since the transformation of newspaper articles or a defunct newspaper into a digitised primary historical source does not affect the market value of the original document, which is derived from its original date of sale several years or decades ago. In the event of a DMCA takedown notice, the files will be removed from the database immediately.

How to cite

We ask that you acknowledge the work that has given you access to this unique digital collection. The Chicago Manual of Style has been used as a guide for the following citations. Feel free to adapt to other commonly used styles.

  • Project website

Madore, Frédérick. Islam West Africa Collection. Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, 2023. https://iwac.frederickmadore.com/s/westafrica. Accessed [date].

  • Specific document

Ouattara, Ousmane Piè. "Projet ZACA: une marche aux allures islamiques". Le Pays, 29 March 2002. https://iwac.frederickmadore.com/s/westafrica/item/5572. Accessed [date].

Data (re)use

All the data is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0), which allows users to "share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format" and to "adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material" for non-commercial purposes only, and only as long as users "give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made".

Documents are freely downloadable, and metadata can be exported in a variety of formats (CSV, TSV, ODS, JSON).

ZMO institutional repository

All metadata from the Islam West Africa Collection are archived in the ZMO's institutional repository in CSV format: https://repositorium.zmo.de/receive/zmo_mods_00000505.

Omeka S API

Omeka S provides an application programming interface (API) that enables CRUD operations on its resources: https://iwac.frederickmadore.com/api.

For more details, see the Omeka S REST API documentation.

OAI-PMH repository

The Islam West Africa Collection uses the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) for metadata dissemination. This protocol uses the Dublin Core metadata standard to enable interoperability of datasets. In the future, this will enable the Collection to become a data provider to major research platforms such as the German Digital Library, Archivportal-D and BASE. The Islam West Africa Collection will also be registered and validated by the EU research infrastructure platform OpenAIRE.

Repository Base Url: https://iwac.frederickmadore.com/oai?verb=Identify.

International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)

The Collection adheres to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) standards, ensuring that the IWAC vast archive is both accessible and interoperable across platforms. IIIF compliance facilitates the preservation of each document, photograph and recording in a digital format, while embedding them in a standardised context. This standardisation is essential to support interoperability across different viewing platforms and academic databases.

Copyright holders

Copyright holders are identified by the Dublin Core term "Rights Holder", which indicates a person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource.