Community Engagement

At Unisa, community engagement is actively promoted through our Community Engagement and Outreach Policy which is firmly set within its vision of being the African university in the service of humanity.

The College of Graduate Studies is actively engaged with the community through a community engagement project. Namely

Promoting the visibility and use of public archives in South Africa through public programming

The project is conducted at the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSA) and the nine provincial archives of South Africa. The aim is to come up with a uniform strategy to promote the visibility and use of public archives in South Africa through public programming. This phase is going to evaluate the progress made and recommend another cycle of action in line with the participatory action research approach. The objectives will be to:

• Outline the discussion points and agreements of the public programming strategy.
• Develop a plan to improve public programming in public archives
• Identify the critical success factors for the implementation of archival public programming strategy.
• Identify the resources that may give public archives repositories in South Africa a sustainable competitive advantage over other institutions offering similar services
• Develop materials that may be used for promoting archives.

The project will develop the capacity of archivists and the archival institutions deal with matters related to the promotion of archives so that they become visible and used by the present and future generations. The fact that archives are managed in order to be used has created a greater interest in public programming. Public programming promotes the utilization of archives