An important and timely recent article by Hans Zell on Nigerian university presses prompts wider questions about the state of Nigerian scholarly publishing, how universities in general and journal publishers in particular adapt, and how libraries access scholarly outputs. This brief response to the article seeks to widen the discussion and encourage further research and action on the subject.

It is becoming realised increasingly that the study and collection of historical children's books is an important facet of bibliographical studies (Library Trends, Spring 1979, was devoted entirely to this area of interest). The Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) has recently set up a small special collection of boys adventure stories set in areas in which the School has special interest and published between the middle of the last century and the outbreak of the Second World War.

These were the books that were introducing Africa and Asia to the school boys who were to become the colonial administrators and business men responsible for overseeing our dual mandate.

The Victoria and Albert Museum, or V&A, is a museum of art, design and performance based in South Kensington, London. It was established in 1852, following on from the 1851 “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” spearheaded by Prince Albert. The museum's collections today number over 2.7 million objects, amassed over the past 150 years through active collecting. Amongst them is a small but very significant collection of Ethiopian material, which tells a story about the complex relationship between Britain and Ethiopia during the 19th century, as well as prompting much discussion about how African collections and objects associated with military expeditions are displayed and interpreted by UK museums today.

The Illustrations Section of the National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) is administered by the library, which, in addition to being a legal depository, is Zimbabwe’s national reference library. It collects printed and audiovisual materials, relating to this country, both published and unpublished, for permanent preservation. The photographic collection originated as a group of 343 prints and negatives illustrating the country’s history from 1561 to 1924 and collected for an exhibition in 1936, and it has grown into a classified and indexed collection of nearly 23 000 negatives and approximately 26 000 photographs. There is also a number of other large deposits, as yet unprocessed, which will be referred to later. The section strives to reach the twin goals of preserving a photographic record of every aspect of life in this country and of providing a service to members of the public.

Asians have played important roles in the social and economic history of Uganda from the start of the colonial period up to the present. Asians had contact with the East African Coast for at least 2000 years. The first Asians to arrive in Uganda were troops from the Punjab, sent to join the colonial army in the mid-1890s. They were followed immediately by indentured workers and ‘free migrants’. Although some colonial officials viewed Asians as important agents in social change and sought to encourage the indentured workers to settle in Uganda, less than twenty percent chose to remain after their contracts expired.

For much of the twentieth century growth of the Asian population in Uganda was due to migration and natural increase in roughly equal proportions. Most migrants came from either the Punjab or Gujurat in Western India, but were not in any sense a homogenous group.

The Yorùbá language materials at the British Library (BL) span the years between 1843, when the first item was published, and the present day, providing an impressive catalogue of the history of Yorùbá writing through the early days of 19th-century missionary writings with a yet undeveloped orthography, the boom of anthropological literature of the later 19th century, the creative fervour of the early and mid-20th century, and the later experimentations of 21st-century monolingual and bilingual writings. From September 2019 to September 2020, I was Chevening Research Fellow at the BL working on this wide-ranging collection with the BL’s Africa Curator. In this article, I present an analysis of what the records contain and what is missing, along with a record of some challenges I faced cataloguing the work – ranging from technological limitations to issues of orthography.

This lecture of 2006, never previously published, describes the making of the film Siliva the Zulu, the first fiction film made in sub-Saharan Africa with an all-black cast. It assesses its value as a rare documentary record of rural Zulu life in the 1920s and the subsequent careers of the film maker Attilio Gatti and anthropologist Lidio Cipriani. The latter’s reputation was tarnished by his support for Mussolini, racism, anti-Semitism and fascism.

Photographs do not seem to have received the attention they deserve as primary sources of information for academic study in Ghana. Reasons for this could be that they are not seen as documents in their own right that merit the same scrutiny as that given to the printed word and archival sources. They are usually not included in the collection development policies of libraries and archives (at least in Ghana), and the existence of such collections locally is virtually unknown. They are not recognised as primary sources for academic inquiry and therefore have no place in libraries or archives; and are not considered worth preserving for posterity. Yet their value is well documented and western academic institutions devote financial resources to their collection, documentation and preservation to make their collections accessible to users (Laryea, 1997).

Tony Kirk-Greene has described to you some of the separate biographies and autobiographies relating to Colonial Administrators in Africa, and also the Staff Lists, Blue Books and other works recording their careers. I would like to follow this by looking at the value of more general biographical reference works in this respect.

The most familiar of such works are the Dictionary of National Biography and Who's Who. The DNB, originally published in 63 volumes, containing 29,000 entries, between 1882 and 1900, supplemented in three further volumes and now brought up to date with ten year supplements, the latest of which brings it to 1970, concentrates on British biographies, but has also included what was originally called “Colonial achievement”, including administrators.

This study investigates the information management in Nigerian Commercial banks; the survey method was adopted for the study. The population constituted the 365 and 248 branches of First Bank and Union Bank respectively. Both purposive and random sampling procedures were used to select the two oldest banks and 129 branches as samples for the study and the 279 samples of the respondents surveyed. The findings revealed that information sources generated are technical reports, statistical data and articles from magazines and newspapers. The technology most used to manage information is electronic mail and computers. Information technology is most important in the storage of data and dissemination of information. The findings indicate that information is used in managerial functions such as planning, controlling, organising, directing and staffing.

The successful Seventh Standing Conference of Eastern, Central and Southern African Librarians was attended by approximately 200 librarians from the region and from the U.K. The Botswana Library Association must be congratulated on hosting and facilitating this conference; a task that included a great deal of fundraising, facilitating accommodation, travel and entertainment. Everyone was very kind, the accommodation good and the food and drink both generous and tasty.

I would like to thank British Council for providing my travel and the Botswana Library Association for my meals and accommodation. I was able to attend all three ‘conferences', visit a village and talk with several government and nongovernment officers while there and it was all a very enjoyable experience.

Between January and April 2016,1 was part of a British Library-funded project to restore, preserve, and digitise the archive of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA). The archive is held in a small room in the bell tower of St. Andrews church, Nairobi. The collection consists of the records of the colonialera Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) and its successor institution, the PCEA, which was formed in 1956 when the African church became independent from the Scottish mission. When I first accessed it, it was being used by the church as a place to store and dump all sorts of miscellaneous and unneeded objects. As well as the heaps of papers, it contained an old lectern, posters, brochures, parish leaflets, and general rubbish. Depending on one's perspective it could have been seen as not much of an “archive”, or much more than one.

Africana resources and collections: three decades of development and achievement, edited by Julian W. Witherell, and published by Scarecrow Press in 1989, is a festschrift honouring Hans Panofsky, a pioneer in Africana librarianship. It was, and continues to be, a fitting tribute to a man who was a leading figure in the promotion of co-ordinated co-operative programmes for acquisitions and bibliographic control of Africana from 1959 to 1989. This one volume with contributing articles by Hans’ Africana colleagues contains a wealth of historical information about librarianship, cataloguing, and the acquisitions of Africana for that time period. An update of this volume is now due.

Within the last two decades, there have been many significant developments in American libraries. This short presentation will not attempt to bridge that distance. Instead, it will offer a brief accounting of fairly recent Africana activity in selected American libraries.