The connections between our work as librarians, archivists or scholars of Africa and the structural foundations of research (in the form of archives, documentation, and publications) we often take for granted. This paper focuses on our ethical responsibilities towards acquisition of Africana, but the principles proposed as ethical guidelines are applicable to other kinds of research, such as fieldwork. I first discuss ethical questions in general and then address how ethics relates to African studies and Africana librarianship. I discuss related problems such as what I term the African “document drain.” In a forthcoming ARD article (Limb 2002c), I elaborate upon these themes with particular emphasis on how emerging new models of partnerships, together with new electronic tools, might help mitigate such problems.

The recent publication of a new bibliography for Swaziland provides an opportunity to review the development of bibliographical work on this small southern African country. Jérôme Vialatte's Swaziland, un royaume en Afrique australe: bibliographic thématique et commentée (1886-2000) is a production of the Centre d'étude d'Afrique noire of the Institut d'Études Politiques de Bordeaux. It is a substantial work - claimed to be “la plus important bibliographie publié sur ce royaume” - with 1,241 bibliographical references, each characterised by a word or phrase, divided into eleven themes and numerous sub-themes. Each sub-theme is prefaced by a commentary on the subject and a brief discussion of the coverage and quality of the references cited. The whole is prefaced by a useful discussion of Vialatte's approach in compiling the bibliography and a very comprehensive review of sources that include not only periodicals with African themes, but for the first time bibliographies on CD-ROM and an extensive selection of Internet websites.

This paper looks briefly at the pattern of hard copy publication of a number of ! international organisations and considers the extent of library holdings of items from these bodies, both in this country and, to a much more limited extent, in the United States. It then lookstat their websites and considers the extent to which the same information is available in both formats. Finally, questions are asked about the value of these websites both for users in Africa and elsewhere and there is also some discussion about the problems which they raise for librarians.

Any mention of the term ‘international organisation’ leads most people to think immediately of the United Nations. But this paper is not about the output of the central bodies of the UN, although there is plenty of material of interest to Africanists coming out of bodies such as the General Assembly, the Security Council and UNESCO, based as they are in New York, Geneva or Paris.