For several decades, members of the Colenso family conducted a vigorous humanitarian campaign across two continents, keeping in touch and exchanging information with one another between England and Natal. Prolific writers, continuously immersed in the often frenetic day to day activity of their campaigning work, they had little time to consider preserving for the future the vast amount of correspondence and documentation they produced. The result is that much of their prodigious output survives today only by chance, dispersed between different collections in the United Kingdom and South Africa.

The Colenso papers are authored not by an individual but severally by the members of a family, the family of John William Colenso, the first Bishop of Natal, his brother in law, his wife, their five children and two daughters in law.

The struggle to liberate the continent of Africa from colonialism during the second half of the twentieth century represented an important epoch and, as such, this history needs to be documented in whatever form for the benefit of posterity and for all, irrespective of class, as the struggle for independence was a collective effort. Accordingly, east and southern Africa's liberation struggles have been well documented over the past few decades and the efforts are still ongoing and gathering momentum as a consequence of the onset of digital technologies as custodians of this heritage battle to move with the times in search of permanence. Custodians of this unique and irreplaceable heritage are mostly political parties that spearheaded the struggle for emancipation. Ironically very few of these liberation movements possess proper archives and much of the primary material such as manuscripts, letters, photographs, publications, tapes etc is in the custody of individuals’ private archives (Mazarire 2009).

The Nordic Africa Institute is a centre for research, documentation and information on modern Africa in the Nordic region. The institute's activities are based on three pillars: research/policy work, publishing activities and a library/documentation centre. Besides producing its own research, the Institute also stimulates research on Africa in the Nordic countries and promotes cooperation between African and Nordic scholars. Networking is included in promotional activities, primarily expressed by researchers’ networks, institutional partnerships and scholarships programs for African researchers and writers. The programmes strengthen the scholarly exchange between African and Nordic research communities.

The library is one of the core activities of the Institute. It is charged with monitoring and making available literature and other electronic and physical information carriers of relevance for research, study and information about modern Africa. At the beginning of 2000, discussions were initiated about setting up a guest librarian programme.

Between September 2008 and September 2009, IRD (Research Institute for Development) established a programme of scanning workshops within the SIST project (System for Scientific and Technical Information) of MAEE (French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs). This initiative involved documentation centers and libraries of public institutions (Universities, Research Institutes) in several French-speaking African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia).

The programme enabled the purchase of scanning equipment (fast A4 scanners, PCs, dedicated software) and training teams to digitise documents (theses, articles, books) produced by the staff (researchers, engineers, students) of participating institutions. The Greenstone software was chosen to provide access, over the Internet, to the collections of digital materials. All teams were trained in the installation, administration and use of this tool.

The collections made by the project participants consist of documents in pdf format. Metadata is made available either by incorporating existing bibliographic databases (usually in the CDS/ISIS format) or by direct input into the metadata fields of digital files. In the latter case, the metadata entries include document title, authors, publication date and subject.

In the first part of our article on the Pan-African Association (PAA), in issue 107 of ARD, we argued against the received position, accepted by most secondary accounts of the Association, that Robert Colenso had been its treasurer. We pointed out that, with one exception, histories of the PAA had made little or no mention of the part played by his brother, Frank Colenso. Our thesis was grounded on the lack of evidence available at the time to justify the claims made regarding Robert Colenso's position in the PAA, on the confusion between the identities of the two brothers that existed in the primary sources, and on the positive evidence, previously largely disregarded, for the role played by Frank in the Association.