The explosion of information in libraries has led to several means and measures of managing this information. New technologies are driving new developments in electronic publishing and learning and people have become increasingly dependent on digital information and the internet as a medium for gaining and exchanging information. There is growing evidence in Uganda of successful digitisation projects to develop digital resources. Libraries and Archives have embarked on digitising their information resources to provide access to and to preserve their unique materials in their collections.

The records at UCU have been digitised and made available in both digital and microfilm format. The digitised Archives of the Church of Uganda Office of the Archbishop are divided into series and these are: Administrative Records, General File, Dioceses, Programs/Activities/Institutions, and Related Organisations.

Indiana University (IU) owns several collections of Africana personal papers. In this presentation, I will discuss this conference's theme, that is the research potential of such papers, from a librarian's perspective, based on my work with those collections, and based on research which resulted from this work.

First, a brief overview of IU's collections of personal papers:

While IU's Africana collection in the Wells Library (i.e., the main library) is primarily a working collection, it also includes several collections of personal papers. Probably the most notable among them is the

German East Africa the largest of the former German colonies had a rather interesting history of care, control and preservation of public records. The aim of this paper is firstly to trace in brief the history of German colonisation in East Africa, as a background to a better understanding of the registry practices and records keeping procedures of the government of German East Africa. Secondly, the paper is intended to relate what has happened to the records of the German era after the colony became a mandate under the British Administration and after the attainment of independence.

Germany's efforts to found colonies in East Africa can be traced as far back as 1884. In September of that year, Dr. Carl Peters, one of the founders of the German Colonization Society (Gesellschaft fuer deutsche Kolonisation) and his friends, set out on a voyage to East Africa to look for colonies.

The Land Resources Division, located in Tolworth Tower, Surbition, Surrey, England, is part of the Overseas Development Administration, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and assists developing countries, mainly tropical, in mapping, investigating and assessing land resources. It makes recommendations on the use of these resources for the development of crop and animal husbandry and forestry; it also gives advice on related subjects to overseas governments and organisations, makes scientific personnel available for appointment abroad, and provides lectures and training courses in the basic techniques of resource appraisal. The Division works in close co-operation with government departments, research institutes, universities and international organisations concerned with land resources assessment and development planning.

The information services are provided by the three units that form the Publications/Information/Library Section.

Africa will not easily shed its sensitivity to its past. It is therefore not surprising that there is a high degree of dissatisfaction with the treatment of the continent in the major library classification schemes. Both the LC and the DDC have gone through far reaching revisions which still fall short of what Africa expects for itself. Given that Africa is trying to keep pace with the rest of the world of information, this article argues that rather than continue to whine about neglect, Africa can take its fate into its own hands and in the process make its own contribution to classification by endowing the library world with a home-grown, Africa-based scheme which can help the revisers of the major schemes to integrate properly the continent into the mainstream.

The Oxford Development Records Project (1977-) is the lineal descendant of the Oxford Colonial Records Project (1963-1972), whose work on collections of private papers acquired from those who had worked in the Colonial Service has been well described by Patricia M. Pugh in Journal of the Society of Archivists, 6, 1978, 76-86 and by J.J. Tawney (‘Personal thoughts on a rescue operation’) in African Affairs, 67, 1968, 345-50.

Neither of these accounts, in the event, paid adequate attention to the Oral History dimensions of the OCRP whereby, with the help of an honorary Research Officer, tape-recorded interviews were concluded between 1967 and 1972 with nearly eighty members of the Colonial Service or Colonial Office (along with a few from the private sector), ranging from the Governor-General with thirty years’ service to his credit to the unconfirmed Cadet who resigned after three.

Recently I was able to describe briefly the collection of the papers of James Phipps housed in the Chancery Masters Exhibits collection in the Public Record Office. At that time it was not possible to do more than suggest the salient characteristics of this collection since the materials were completely unorganized and in exactly the same condition as when they were deposited some two centuries ago. This collection has now been organized, albeit in a somewhat inchoate form, and some further assesment of its contents and value can be attempted. The reorganization of these materials has resulted in their being reclassified — unfortunately still within the Chancery Masters Exhibits classification rather than the T70 series — and this note is intended to introduce the new system and to enumerate its contents more fully.

James Phipps spent more than twenty years on the Gold Coast in the service of the Royal African Company.

Lesotho originated as an independent African kingdom whose 19th-century monarch, King Moshoeshoe, suffered the humiliation of seeing his people's lands diminished as a result of confrontations with white settlers on the High Veld.

Not long after the creation of the Orange Free State Republic in 1854, the process of encroachment escalated, and at one point it seemed likely to lead to the extinction of Lesotho as an independent policy. King Moshoeshoe, however, astutely invited British intervention, and Lesotho survived, though it had by then lost much of its best agricultural land. The country remained under British rule for the period 1868 to 1966, a period during which it was known as Basutoland.

This article arises out of our experience in the compilation of a bibliography on the East African economies of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda. Approximately one-quarter of the items were gathered between 1976 and 1979 by Killick, and the compilation of the remainder was organized by Finucane and Rupley in 1980 and 1981. The classification system was largely designed by Killick. Nearly all the work was carried out at the University of Nairobi. The bibliography is to be published by G.K. Hall, Boston, as Tony Killick, Lawrence Rupley, Brendan Finucane, The Economies of East Africa: 1974-1980. This present compilation serves to update Tony Killick's The Economies of East Africa( Boston: G.K. Hall, 1976), which covered the 1963-1974 time period. For the most part, this volume takes up where the earlier one ended, although items missed in the earlier one are included herein.

This paper is based upon the responses of a group of Scottish readers to Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). For almost all of the readers this represented their first encounter with African fiction. As the preceding quotation makes clear, it was not one that they had solicited and for some at least, it was not one that they relished.

The encounter came about as part of a pre-access course taught under the auspices of the Adult Education Department of Glasgow University. The course ran on two occasions in Stranraer and on one occasion in the Gorbals, a residential area on the south side of the Clyde.

For the past three years the media of the Western World have been full of news about the great famine in Africa. The horrific pictures of the starving in Ethiopia or Mali have resulted in large sums of money being collected from the pockets of the well-fed rich of the first world for redistribution to the starving poor of the third. Bob Geldof’s Live Aid Concert was not only the most spectacular concert of any kind ever sponsored: it was the most successful one-off fund-raising event ever staged. So much money was raised that Geldof and his colleagues responsible for administering it could not spend it all immediately on supplies for famine relief and began to consider using some of the funds at their disposal for long-term developmental and research projects that would help avert future famines of the kind which still, alas, continue to plague some parts of the African continent.

Cataloguing principles and the rules that evolve from them have not been devised in a cognitive vacuum. The evolution took place in a Western cultural context and inevitably presents the problem of biases. When these cataloguing rules are applied to materials originating from non-Western cultures such biases surface and often constitute serious difficulties. This is the case with Africana materials that have caused and are still causing numerous problems to many a cataloguer. For example, many authors (Iwuji 1989, Aderibidge and Udo 1990) have pointed out the inadequacy of Library of Congress (LC) and Dewey Decimal (DD) classification schemes with regard to Africana materials claiming that they are restrictive, inhospitable, unfair, and biased.

Serendipity and surprise occasionally contribute to the work of the historian. A chance discovery of crucial documents, a word from an informant, or a brief text helping to resolve a puzzle from the past, can set the adrenalin pulsing. Despite the apparent dull, desk-bound procedures of historical research it can at times be a rather exciting venture with eureka moments. There is another dimension that never ceases to thrill me: bringing to life an insignificant voice from the past, recovering the words of those supposedly ‘without history’, giving flesh and being to a forgotten ‘common person’, and contributing a further piece of evidence to history ‘from below’.

Here is a eureka moment, John L. Comaroff, the South African social anthropologist describing finding the diary of Sol T. Plaatje written about the siege of Mafeking in 1899: “The document was discovered by accident rather than by design.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the significance of publication of antiapartheid periodicals within South Africa; to describe some of the difficulties under which researchers, writers and publishers operate; to attempt a categorization of this type of material; and to explain why the documentalist and indexer plays an important role in the study and understanding of present, and future, South African society. Excluded from this survey are literary and creative publications which could also be classified as anti-apartheid.

There exists in South Africa a long and honourable tradition of antiapartheid periodical publishing. The response from those who hold the reins of power has been a vigorous campaign of censorship which, in the context of South Africa's political economy, may be seen as a logical necessity.

Digital resources and the speed and ease with which researchers anywhere can now access vast amounts of information have transformed the nature of the research process. The advent of electronic resources and digital libraries and repositories has also dramatically changed the function of academic libraries in terms of organization, service delivery, and collection development, with much information and many resources now accessed online. Nowadays, librarians and information professionals are expected to provide services to library users who increasingly demand instant access to information on multiple digital platforms.

The attraction of electronic resources and the archiving of these resources, is easy to understand: they are eco-friendly, time and cost saving, offer multi-access, round the clock availability, and provide a facility to access resources without requiring a physical presence in the library.

In 2005 I helped organise an exhibition of the work of two Cameroonian studio photographers in the National Portrait Gallery, London (see ed. Swenson 2005). This arose from my twenty year involvement as a social anthropologist working in Cameroon. One of the photographers, Joseph Chila, introduced me to Jacques Touselle who had taught him photography in the early 1960s. Together we made several visits to ‘Photo Jacques’ in Mbouda, Western Province, and I was shown the pile of boxes containing what I now know to be some 40,000 negatives, which is the legacy of Touselle's 40 year career. The collection is an unparalleled archive of local photographic practices spanning several decades. With the help of the British Library's ‘Endangered Archives Programme’ the negatives are being scanned and catalogued as a first step to ensuring their long term survival.

Since pioneering work in the late 1970s (e.g. Sprague 1978) there has been an explosion of interest in African photography.