Building Open Access Repository in Eritrea with limited resources

Eritrea has a long history of colonial occupation. As a consequence, it has never had a national archive for preserving its own cultural heritage. All its colonizers attempted to destroy its heritage so as to erase its identity. Eritreans, however, were aware of that, and so, during the war for national liberation, Eritreans buried books and documents underground, hid them in caves, or moved them out of the country. The country's collections are available in a range of formats, including print materials, photographs, video cassettes, audio cassettes, and microfilm. Large collections of Geez manuscripts and codices aged more than 1000 years are still undigitized due to limited resources, inadequate infrastructure and less fund. The challenges that hinder the digitization, availability and accessibility of these resources to the public are diverse among which non-availability of broadband connection, poor infrastructure, inadequate skilled manpower, poor management skills and budget constraints. Finally, the paper will come up with realistic solutions such as the establishment of Open Repository, digitization of selected materials to ensure the services of the repository beyond traditional academic content as much as possible even with limited resources to ensure equity and democratization of knowledge.