Published February 25, 2025
by Alison Lang, UTL News
In the Southern African country of Botswana, in the town of Serowe, a small museum with a bright red roof holds the stories of a country’s soul.
Since 1985, curators and staff at the Khama III Memorial Museum have stewarded several important collections that include the papers of the Khama dynasty – the family of political leaders who, through skill and resistance, helped Botswana become the proudly independent and resource-rich country it is today.
As part of a groundbreaking new partnership with a group of University of Toronto librarians, the museum will soon be able to digitize, preserve and share these remarkable holdings with scholars all over the world, while ensuring the physical items remain with the museum, where they belong.
The project first took root at a roundtable hosted by the American Library Association international in 2022. As part of a three-month peer support program, U of T metadata librarian Jordan Pedersen connected with Olga Tladi, a librarian at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology.
That year, U of T had earmarked funding for building equity and diversity in collections through innovative practices, such as digitization. At the end of the program, Pedersen flagged this funding to Tladi in the event they could work together.
While Tladi didn’t have any projects suitable for the funding, she knew others that did – and soon Pedersen was connecting with curators from the Khama III Memorial Museum to learn more about the papers of Khama III, the founding father of the Bamangwato tribe, and his descendants. In this invaluable and extensive collection, government letters, invitations, photos and even a list of transported cattle tell the story of Botswana’s journey to self-determination, unique amongst African nations.
“Khama III’s contribution was huge,” says Khama III Memorial Museum curator Gase Kediseng. “Not only to Serowe, but to the tribe, the regime, and the entire southern African region. His son’s papers are also included, and altogether the collection is dated from 1876 to 1959, with papers from World War Two, from British correspondence, and tribal documents. There is so much here that is relevant to South African history as a whole.”
“This is the family that guided Botswana through independence up to the current political moment,” says Jeff Newman, college librarian at New College and African history specialist who joined the Botswana project after initial meetings. “It’s very important to get insight on these materials from an African perspective, and from these rare first-hand accounts.”
In addition to the historical significance of the materials, there was an added urgency in moving a potential digitization project forward– many of the items in Khama family collection are extremely delicate and in threat of erosion.
“A lot of the material was very sensitive because it was written on paper and ink,” Pedersen said. “So there was a countdown before the material totally disintegrated. We realized we really needed to get the funding landed soon.”
Kediseng says her team had been searching for a partnership to assist with preserving and digitizing the materials for a number of years. When U of T reached out, she says her small group – currently consisting of six full-time staff, plus a clutch of volunteers – felt a palpable sense of relief that this important work could finally begin.
“The opportunity was a godsend, something we really wanted,” she says. “Maybe – finally – something will get done, something we wanted so much. Because digitization does not just cover easier access – the main thing is preservation. That is something we were looking for, and very excited about.”
The building blocks for a plan were set into place. Over the next two years, Pedersen and Newman brought on more colleagues to the U of T team to lend their expertise to various aspects of the project. These included digital preservation librarian Steve Marks, coordinator of Humanities collections Eva Jurczyk, electronic resources librarian Erin Calhoun, and outreach & engagement librarian for Black Studies Amal Hussein. As plans developed, two key considerations were always at the forefront: the Khama III Museum would keep the physical materials, and the museum had to reap the benefits of the collaboration locally, on their own terms.
“Institutions have a history of going in and taking things,” says Newman. “There’s a lot of examples of universities going to Africa, finding large collections of documents that are important in a political or cultural context, and they box them up and take them back to the states. And that doesn’t help anyone in Africa.”
“We really tried to think – what would it look like to have a project like this?” Pedersen says. “Something that isn’t colonial and extractive, but instead very supportive and builds capacity? This is uncharted territory – this is not something commonly done within the building of library collections.”
Throughout the planning process, U of T’s librarians worked closely with the Botswana group to understand the museum’s institutional needs and preferences for the collection and how it would be shared. This included ensuring the museum received the tools and training to perform the digitization on site and had final input on the digital hosting provider. The museum also weighed in on the most appropriate equipment (such as scanners and cameras) given its rural location and other environmental considerations unique to Southern Africa, like rolling power outages.
“The U of T team had a lot of respect for what we do - they’ve allowed us to shape how we want the whole thing to be done,” said Kediseng. “They have made suggestions, and if we don’t agree with it, we will suggest something else, and they understand and respect that. They know that they are talking to people who know the material and understand it. We always had the final say.”
Through the collaborative efforts of both teams, the funding agreement with U of T was landed in early fall of 2024. The final arrangement will see the digitization of 100,000 items at a cost of $130,000 over two years, with funding covering digitization equipment and staffing for physical processing, scanning and metadata creation. On U of T’s side, the libraries will receive perpetual access to the digitized materials, supporting valuable African scholarship for faculty and students for decades to come.
As far as international partnerships go, the Botswana/U of T project is unprecedented, and groundbreaking – built on a foundation of collegiality and mutual respect during monthly Zoom meetings across time zones and continents. From learning about current affairs to lively discussions about the Canada and Botswana Olympic teams, Pedersen says both teams forged a strong sense of understanding and common ground, and this was critical to the work moving forward.
“We had a lot of exchanges - not really related to the project, but that helped us build a relationship – a real friendship,” Pedersen says. “I don’t think any of the work we had done would have been possible if the two sides had not expressed genuine curiosity about the other. It was always the highlight of my day, talking to Gase and her team.”
“Respect is important to me because we’re a small institution. There are other larger institutions, even in our country, who would look down on smaller museums like us,” says Kediseng. “It’s annoying - because we might be small, but we are professionals as well. We know our job. It can be very frustrating to have to prove yourself all the time. When you work with people who understand and respect you, it’s huge – and with this partnership, it was special, different and beautiful.”
As of this writing, the U of T and Khama III Memorial Museum teams are moving on to the next phase of the project, with digitization equipment set to arrive in Botswana in early March of 2025. The next steps will involve U of T digital specialists working remotely with the museum team to develop work flows, training and other metadata processes, with the museum’s goal to hire additional staff to support the project in the spring. More updates to come.