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.

I have always been very interested in “fringe” or “non-standard” publications. I was active in the “little magazine” movement in England in the sixties, publishing and collecting poetry from small presses. I now live in Brazil, where I avidly purchase the popular poetry pamphlets which are still sold on market stalls. It was natural, therefore, that when I was a lecturer in the Department of Library Science, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, in 1974-5, I should become interested in Onitsha market literature. I went to Onitsha twice, and visited publishers and printshops (I have had experience in setting type and working printing presses). I drafted a brief article on Onitsha publications, but other pressures prevented me from preparing it for the press. In 1983 I showed the draft to Miss Use Sternberg, responsible for African acquisitions in the British Library, Reference Division.

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.

We have spent much of today talking about refugees in southern Africa, refugees who have been spawned by the war in the sub-continent, which has produced its toll of misery and suffering and death. By and large, we have been talking about people who have been displaced from their homes as a result of war and political upheaval, though sometimes it is difficult to separate out the political from the economic. In an immediate sense, of course, South Africa has also generated its political refugees - the thousands of children who fled Soweto after the massacre of 1976 were but the last and the most numerous and most dramatic of the recent refugees to have fled from South Africa for overtly political reasons - some to join the liberation movements and fight from outside, some simply to escape the fate they feared if they remained behind.

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.

As the pace of change accelerates in Southern Africa researchers find themselves increasingly dependent upon press sources. Media items are an essential primary source material both for research projects and for carrying out the necessary groundwork for preparing development projects. The volume and complexity of the source material makes the organisation and retrieval of usable information increasingly difficult. One answer to this problem is to store all the media material on computer and then let the computer manipulate, collate and retrieve the information ready for interpretation.

Given the complex interrelationships within the Southern African region, events in one country can have an immediate impact on others. A retrieval system is able to rapidly extract the linkage implications within the region. It is also possible to input the key international dimensions.

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.

The Library of the Royal Commonwealth Society, founded in 1868, has built up a very substantial collection on Nigeria over the years, and therefore had a good basis on which to undertake responsibility for that country, under the SCOLMA scheme, in 1964. A progress report was made in April 1969 and published in Conference on the Acquisition of Material from Africa, I.D.C. 1969, pp.88-90, also R.C.S. Library Notes, new series No.152, August 1969. Many of the problems described therein still apply, but the following summary outlines the position at the close of 1975.

Though the main purpose of the scheme is to acquire material published in the country concerned, the Library endeavours to obtain significant material published outside Nigeria, and this is relatively easy.

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.

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.

In 1973 Dr. Stephen Baier published a short note on the archives in Niger. Since then, the structure, organization and even location of what is now officially called the Archives Nationales du Niger have undergone considerable changes. In fact, at the time Dr. Baier carried out his research in Niger, the Archives Nationales were little more than bundles of mostly unclassified documents and files stored away in a dark room in the Supreme Court building. However, in 1973 a professional archivist (Elhadji-Mahamane Sade) was appointed Director of the Service des Archives, which then came formally into being. One year later the archives were transferred to a newly completed building just a few yards away from that of the Supreme Court (and next to the ‘palais de la Présldence’).

Leaving to one side the sui generis Royal African Society, which in 2000 marked its centenary with a special history (Rimmer and Kirk-Greene, 2000), the formalised study of Africa in British academia may be said to be approaching its 80th year. For it was in 1926 that the International African Institute, originally the Institute of African Languages and Cultures, was founded in London, followed two years later by the maiden issue of its journal for practising Africanists, Africa, still among the flagship journals in the African field. Indeed, the 1920s were alive with new institutions promoting an interest in African affairs, whether it be the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (1924); the Phelps-Stokes Commission reports on education in British Africa (1920-24), culminating in the Colonial Office Memorandum on Education Policy (1925); the major contribution to public awareness made by the Empire Exhibition at Wembley, however politically incorrect some of its idiom seems today; or the attention generated by the League of Nations’ Mandates Commission, the bulk of whose remit was focused on Africa and whose British representative was no less than Lord Lugard, the biggest “Africanist” of his day.

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.