The National Documentation Centre in Khartoum was set up by the Sudanese Government in 1974 as part of the National Council for Research, which had been set up in 1973. The aims of the National Council for Research are to

Within the same Act there was provision for

Thus on the face of it, the National Documentation Centre exists solely to provide research information in order to facilitate government research. In practice, the Centre has taken on and is attempting to take on far broader responsibilites in the fields of librarianship and information science.

Geography is well established as an academic discipline in Britain, and geographers make a substantial contribution to African studies here. About 30 British university teachers are concerned primarily with the human geography of Africa, and for about 30 others it is a subsidiary interest. These individuals are widely scattered around the country (Appendix 1), and their particular concerns are very diverse, so many are not closely in touch with one another. No organization binds them together or reviews their work, and therefore this is a purely personal assessment - though it has benefitted from the comments of several colleagues.

A review such as this is inevitably somewhat arbitrary in its limits, for the studies in question take place within a complex system of interrelationships with a wider range of studies.

This article deals with the British Library's collections on Africa, and especially with its collection of private papers of India Office officials (with a particular focus on the twentieth century). The choice of India-related collections may seem surprising, but in fact these records contain much that is relevant to African history.

In this article I am concerned not only to describe what is held at the British Library, but to discuss the historical construction of these collections. That is, how factors that might be thought mundane and pedestrian - decisions about the selection or destruction of records, and their preservation and arrangement - affect both the nature of archival holdings and the scholarship built upon them.

African studies has increasingly gained recognition as an area of study on both sides of the Atlantic. For us in the Caribbean it is of particular significance since Africa is the ancestral home of the majority of the population in most of the territories which comprise the English-speaking Caribbean. Among the legacies of colonialism was an education system based on the English curriculum which resulted either in the absence of or a biased representation of Africa in schools. There have been, however, particularly in Jamaica initially, distinct elements in the society for whom Africa had an even greater significance. The movement associated with Marcus Garvey and also the Rastafari cult are both groups which believed that Africa was home and whose members looked forward to the day when they might return there.

When I began researching for my talk, I started by consulting the published volume celebrating SCOLMA's 50th anniversary that came out of the 2012 conference on African studies in the digital age: disconnect? I turned to the index at the back of the book to see how many times the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) was mentioned. There were three entries. The first included the programme amongst a list of projects that have supported or funded both large-scale and smaller digitisation initiatives in the region. The second mention was slightly more critical in tone, saying that the programme should provide more technical and logistical assistance, and the last reference was a brief sentence about a Gambian historian who had consulted the digitised Muslim court rolls from one of our projects when writing his doctoral thesis.

The connection between the Sudan and Durham (England) may not be immediately obvious. Indeed, one might wonder why the largest collection of original research material on the Sudan outside the Sudan, apart from the Public Record Office, London, happens to be in Durham rather than elsewhere. In 1957, the year after the Sudan became independent and some years before the Oxford Colonial Records Project and St. Antony's Middle East Private Papers collection were set up, Durham had the three vital ingredients for successful archival enterprise: knowledge and enthusiasm (Mr. R.L. Hill, lecturer in Modern Near Eastern History at Durham University, formerly of Sudan Government Railways); premises and academic support (Professor T.W. Thacker, Director of the School of Oriental Studies, Durham University); and a sponsor in good standing with potential donors, with a Durham interest (Mr. K.D.D. Henderson, formerly of the Sudan Political Service and Secretary of the Spalding Trust).

As Ian Colvin observed in his classic Introduction to Sidney Mendelssohn's South African Bibliography, the first recorded voyage round the Cape (by Bartholomew Diaz in 1487) took place at about the time that printing was being ‘invented’ (that is, re-discovered and developed) in Europe. Yet it was not until 1910, more than four centuries later, that the, first comprehensive bibliographical record relating to Southern Africa appeared in print. The almost ‘onlie begetter’ of this seminal work was the elder son of a comparatively impecunious liberal Jewish Rabbi, a mid-19th century immigrant to Britain from Germany, albeit a collateral descendant of the distinguished philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Sidney, brought up in the West country, followed his father to Kimberley soon after the latter had taken up his appointment as Minister to the Jewish Congregation of the small diamond-field town in 1878.

Philately is a subject which, generally, is little appreciated outside its devotees, and tends to be equated to the more general hobby of stamp collecting. However, the study of the production and use of stamps and postal history is very actively pursued and has a not insignificant place in the recording of the economic, social and, in some instances, the political history of virtually every country of the world.

As a result of the lack of appreciation of the subject, the researcher sometimes finds difficulty in obtaining the necessary assistance and access to official and other records to enable him to find the information he requires. It is the intention of this paper to give some insight into the types of research work being undertaken and the various sources from which the required information can be obtained.

In the Netherlands there is an active community of Africanist scholars, numbering about 200 to 250. They work mainly in universities and other research institutes, but also in increasing numbers for government ministries (notably of Foreign Affairs and Development Co-operation), NGOs, and other aid organisations. Fields in which Africanists are strong are history, anthropology and geography, and to a lesser extent development sociology, medical science, law, comparative politics and religious studies. The following survey is necessarily a selective one.

African Studies in the Netherlands can pride itself on a long history only if we include the many travellers, traders and missionaries active in African regions before the twentieth century. The scholarly study of the continent seriously started a few decades later than in other European countries: after the Second World War, when an Africa Institute was founded (in 1946, see below) and the first special professorial chair in African ethnology was instituted at Leiden University.

Many commercial and non-commercial initiatives regarding electronic journals have started in the last decade. They are, however/so widespread and ad hoc that a complete overview of all online journals is not possible. This paper offers a brief description of the current state of affairs concerning electronic journals from and about Africa and highlights some of the trends.

Paper journals have existed since 1665 when the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appeared in London and Le Journal des Scavans in Paris. A hundred years later more than ten scientific journals were available, mostly published by learned societies in Europe. And by 1850, there were well over a thousand journals with articles specialising in all different scientific fields from ethnology to medicine and geology to philosophy. By 1980 there were well over 180,000 different scientific journals.

Mr Kirk-Greene, who five years ago started work on the history of the modern British Colonial Service in Africa with the help of pilot research grants from the British Academy, the Rhodes Trust and the Hoover Institution, prefaced his talk by drawing attention to the vigorous current revival of interest in the colonial period. He cited the recent phenomenon of the “mini-industry” on the Raj - instancing the time given by television, radio, SOAS and the Imperial War Museum to Charles Allen's oral history project Plain Tales from the Raj and Raj: A Scrapbook; the success of Paul Scott's novels in the Ran Quartet, now being filmed; the India Office Library Hunt and Harrison project, The District Officer in India;