Making children’s books in South African Languages more discoverable!
Puku Is an award-winning reading and book promotion organisation dedicated to ensuring children’s access to quality literature in the languages they understand. Since inception in 2010, Puku has been a strategic convenor for collaborative projects and digital platforms to promote children’s literature multilingually through an organised system for selecting and reviewing children’s books.
Puku aims to ensure that all children have access to quality, culturally relevant literature in all South African languages. One of Puku’s primary vehicles for promoting this, is the creation of an engaging and innovative digital encyclopedia that houses and reviews literature and bodies of work for what will be South Africa’s first comprehensive database of children’s literature (Pukupedia) and which promotes the buying and reading of books that affirm the African child.
To serve the African language space for children: As a foundational step to the Pukupedia, a metadata capturing portal will be developed in order to aggregate information on children’s book written in South African languages.
The ONIX compliant portal aligns with the forward thinking of the global book industry standards adopted by South Africa for a metadata standard. The portal will make it easier to capture local book data in SA languages thus improving the access to and promotion of books, so that authors, publishers, buyers, and consumers of children’s African literature content source, select and buy locally produced children’s books.
In collaboration with already secured key partners, specifically Rhodes University Education Department for content creation and the University of South Africa for library information systems, Puku will lead the upskilling of a new corps of expertise to provide content for the new portal. The new portal will turbo-boost our collaborative catalogue project to produce catalogues of children’s books in all our languages!
Community Outreach and Events: education@puku.co.za
Administration/General Inquiries: reception@puku.co.za
Finance: admin@puku.co.za
Executive Director: executivedirector@puku.co.za
Digital: onix@puku.co.za
Mailing and Physical Office Address:
Puku Children’s Literature Foundation
Hugh Masekela Foundation
136 Barry Hertzog Avenue
Greenside, Randburg, 2193
Office phone: +27 67 178 1321