The Library collection was formed on the establishment of the Institute of Colonial Studies by University Statute in 1945. The moving spirit behind the formation was the doyenne of British Africanists, Margery Perham (later Dame Margery), who became the first Director and a prinicpal benefactor. The Library's first home was at 10 Keble Road.

In 1956 the Institute was renamed Commonwealth Studies basically because the word “Colonial” was no longer in vogue, and because it did not adequately describe the work done in the Institute which was naturally reflected in the material held by the Library. Then in 1960 the Institute, while retaining its identity and University responsbilities, moved with its Library, Office, and academic personnel into its present home, Queen Elizabeth House at 21 St. Giles.

Last year the University of Texas at Austin celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of what was to become the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, an archive named after a former English professor who had risen rapidly up the university's administrative ranks, using his considerable budgetary authority as Dean, Vice President, Provost, President, and finally Chancellor of the entire fifteen-campus University of Texas system to fulfill his vision of establishing in Austin “a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliotheque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation”. To get things started, on September 11,1957, in his position as Director of the university's Rare Book Collection, he wrote a formal letter to himself authorising the expenditure of $25,000 from Special Research Collections in Humanities “to purchase books and materials for the use of the humanities faculty in furthering their research”.

King's College London agreed to participate in the area specialisation scheme in 1966, with responsibility for the publications of the Portuguese African territories, principally because of its well established Portuguese Department. The College Library already possessed a strong collection of Portuguese history, largely as a heritage of Professor Edgar Prestage's term of office as Camoen Professor, and this included most of the basic secondary works on the history of the Portuguese in Africa. Established links with Portuguese Government agencies, particularly in the Instituto de Alta Cultura and the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, brought in, as gifts, a continuing supply of monographs in series such as Estudos, ensaios e documentos and Estudos de Ciencias Politicas e Sociais, many of which dealt with the African territories.

The UNESCO project for a General History of Africa has been around for some time now. It was launched in 1964 by a resolution of the General Conference of UNESCO, and was essentially a consequence of the accession to the United Nations and to UNESCO of the large number of new African states which secured their independence in the early 1960s. These felt, rightly, that Africa had too long been ‘the dark continent’ of world history, and that it was high time that, the history of its peoples and cultures was placed on the same level of public record as that of the other continents.

The first positive step taken by UNESCO was to call a ‘meeting of experts’ at Abidjan in 1966. This seems to have taken the line that the first thing to be done if the history of Africa were to be written on a major scale was to provide support for research into it.

This article explains what has led to privatisation of some library services in Nigerian university libraries, with emphasis on the Ahmadu Bello University Library experience. It also discusses the prospects and problems of already privatised services such as photocopying and word processing. Other viable services for privatisation are enumerated.

The Olive Schreiner Letters Project (OSLP) is making use of ‘personal papers’ associated with, amongst a number of other important concerns, the history of Southern Africa, and doing so in an innovative way. The OSLP is transcribing and analysing all of the extant letters of the feminist, social theorist and writer Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), and will contribute theoretically and methodologically to the use of letters and other epistolary materials in social science and humanities research. In addition, the project will publish in digital format transcripts of the complete Schreiner letters, which will be free access. The project is funded by the ESRC (RES-062-23-1286), and is multi-site, led by principal investigator Professor Liz Stanley, and with research and technical teams based at the universities of Edinburgh, Leeds Metropolitan and Sheffield.

In the early 1950s it became apparent to the Rhodesia Government that the rapid increase in literacy amongst Africans, due to the increased tempo of education, would present its own problem. This problem can best be summed up in three words, “Literacy without Literature.” Many school leavers only reached primary level and, although literate, were only literate in their own vernaculars, Shona or Ndebele. Unless books in these languages were provided urgently the people would lose their newly attained skill through sheer lack of practice and in many cases revert to illiteracy. Literacy creates its own type of hunger, hunger for books which must be satisfied, or frustration will ensue.

Thus, in 1953, the Rhodesia Literature Bureau was created, (since 1963 it has been part of the Department of African Education) to make available a supply of literature to fulfil these special needs.

The IRD (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development) is a French research institute serving the Mediterranean and intertropical countries that make science and innovation one of the first levers of their development. It is a French public science and technology establishment (EPST) which is under the dual supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.

The Decree of 1 December 1955 (ORSTOM 1955) organising the services of the Office for Scientific and Technical Research Overseas, published in the Official Journal of the French Republic of 21 December 1955, defines the existence of a documentation centre under the direction of the Institute. Article 6 of the decree states that “le Centre de documentation est charge1 d'assurer le depouillement, la conservation et la diffusion de la documentation scientifique et technique se rapportant aux activitfe de 1'O.R.S.T.O.M.”.

It has been commonly supposed that there are major factors inherent in tropical environments which make them uniquely problematic, and essentially inhospitable-to agricultural development. They, and especially their soils, are seen as intractable and fragile, and liable to break down irreversibly if man dares to meddle with the delicate, but vaguely conceived and tenuously defined, “ecological balance” (see Gourou, 1953; Stamp, 1953 a,b; Richards, 1952; 1970; Janzen, 1975; inter alia). The unarticulated corollory is that more temperate environments are,to a great extent robust and unproblematic. Both premises may be seriously questioned, and their conjunction is dubious in the extreme. In the first place, though it may be demonstrated with some plausibility that tropical environments have presented obstacles to productive agricultural development, it remains to be shown that these problems are solely the consequence of environmental characteristics, or whether perhaps the major factor is the lack of appropriate ingenuity, with technological inventiveness inhibited by the temperate blinkers of those responsible for technological research.