A Case Study in the Development of a Database of Traditional Plants in Ghana

Introduction

Over time, communities in Africa, including Ghana, have developed (and continue to develop) appropriate technologies and practices that serve different purposes in their lives. One important area is health care. In the northern part of Ghana lies an old digital archive or an herbarium (an information store on plant information).  This herbarium is a store of plant information dating back to Ghana’s pre-independence in 1957. Among other things, this herbarium contains information on plant species useful for various roles, including traditional health practice.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a librarian developed a proposal to understand more about the traditional knowledge in Ghana with respect to traditional medication. After talking with members of a local Ghanaian community to learn more about traditional plants and their use in past pandemics, this quest led to discovering an herbarium (a store of plant information) is critical to information science and related disciplines.

The Archive

The archive (an herbarium) is a collection of dry herbarium specimens with a reference sheet of information about each plant specimen and details of the collection. This collection of documented plant information was spearheaded by Rose Innes, a biologist, and others in 1948. It is a one of a kind collection containing unique plant species that are found in Ghana. The herbarium specimens at Nyankpala (a town in northern Ghana), can be described as a great wealth of archaeological finds for academic scholarship. They are valuable materials for research and academic purposes.

The herbarium of plant species is a painstaking effort by botanists/biologists to collect and identify different plant species in virtually every part of Ghana (then Gold Coast). This collection (in the form of photos with text attached to the photo) could easily describe a thousand species. This collection could become a possible candidate for future DNA barcoding for accurate identification of the plant species. It is a great treasure to Ghana, a present from those dedicated scientists of the Gold Coast, and we would be doing them and ourselves a disservice if we do not take measures to preserve them. It has been locked up for decades, inaccessible to the public, without proper ventilation and/or storage. Even though there are professionals (scientists, librarians and archivists) that can manage it, lack of funding has prevented any measure that can restore this rich source of information. Digitizing this collection will become one of Ghana’s rare digital repositories.

The text of the information is in English, except for Botanical names and local names of geographical locations. The local names are in Ghanaian dialects. The physical material in the collection will still be located at the Nyankpala Station of the Research Institute but basic preservation measures would be undertaken to extend the lifespan of the materials.  The digital copies will be preserved in an online environment.

To preserve the collection, the raw data will first be added to Excel, then the data will be imported into Omeka or D-Space and accessed through the British Library website and another (yet to be determined) website in Ghana. The British Library and the CSIR in Nyankpala will share copyright of the materials.

The Need for Digitization

This collection needs to be urgently preserved because the paper on which the information was embedded is deteriorating fast and there is a high risk of losing this information. The documents are near total destruction. Some have already been lost to activities of rodents and other pests. The material is brittle. They have gathered a lot of dust and cobwebs. For now, we can search for and fetch all the materials, sweep the environment in which they are located, dust them very well, remove all the cobwebs on them and repackage them in available cupboards.

Digitization of this information would preserve it and enable electronic sharing of the information with the rest of the world. It will become a model for similar Herbaria to be set up in other parts of the country.

Lack of information on medicinal use of these traditional plants is hindering Ghana’s scholarly output. This sometimes leads to poor research or replication of research as scholars are unaware of what research has already been done. This project will establish a database of about one thousand plant species and facilitate their identification to promote extensive research work on forages. It will particularly be useful to botanists and facilitate the generation of knowledge on their current distribution. There will be more studies into the medicinal plants of Ghana. In Ghana, the majority of the population still depends on plant medicine. The need to validate this is paramount. The combined effect of research into livestock, forage and medicinal plants will increase livestock productivity, ensure the development of new herbal medicines and consequently, improve livelihoods.

Engaging the Community

To learn more about the use of the plants found in the collection, an interview guide on the role of traditional knowledge in traditional health practice would be developed. Participants include older folks (30 and above) who have lived through at least one pandemic or have had some experience in traditional health knowledge with respect to traditional medication.

Metadata

One of the requirements for the  project is to develop metadata to describe the materials in the collection. Metadata will be created using a template list. The template lists different fields to describe each document. At the end of the project, it is expected that a total of 4093 specimens on various plant species and the information on them will be digitized for use by the users.  This listing template, or metadata is the description that  will allow recall or findability of these documents in the future.

The metadata for each photo of the plants already includes the region where the plant is found, the local name of the plant, the botanical name of the plant, the year the information was collected and the name of the person who collected that information. Additional data will be added related to the uses of these plants as told by the people in the community.

This case study was written by Kodjo Atiso, PhD.