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PART I:
AFRICAN STUDIES
IN THE UNITED STATES
āCan We Get There from Here?ā
Negotiating the Washouts,
Cave-Ins, Dead Ends, and Other Hazards
on the Road to Research on Africa
Gretchen Walsh
Gretchen Walsh is affiliated with the African Studies Library, Boston University, 771 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215 (E-mail:
[email protected]).
SUMMARY. This introduction to Africana reference describes the populations of researchers, the kinds of questions they ask, and how librariansāboth specialist and generalistāmay respond. It explores issues in āknown-itemā searches, including name authority and access to material in collected works and series. Choices made by authors, publishers, indexers
, librarians, and researchers themselves have an impact on topic searches. Terminology for African languages, ethnic groups, place names, and topics cause problems for novice researchers, but library policy decisions can also impede access. Errors of all kinds-minor or major-can block access to information. The speed of electronic desktop publishing seems to have encouraged reduced care with proofreading, indexing, and verification of quotations and citations. The need for accurate information about Africa is great, but the market for publications and electronic resources focused on Africa is relatively small. This low market share can result in less coverage of Africa in indexes and reference tools. Despite the difficulties encountered in researching Africa, researchers and the librarians who assist them benefit from the tools, services, and initiatives of specialist Africana librarians and from a number of commercially produced resources.
[Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1ā800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: [email protected]> Website: http://www.HaworthPress.comĀ© 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.] KEYWORDS.Africa, Africana Librarians Council, African Studies Association, reference functions, name authority, contents notes, analytics, access, keywords, subject headings, search strategies, indexing, full-text searching, terminology, cataloguing, errors, citations, indexes
WHO WANTS TO KNOW WHAT? THE QUESTORS, THE QUEST AND THE GUIDES
ā¢ āWhat is the population of Dar es Salaam? What was it in 1950 and 1900?ā
ā¢ āMy team is representing Namibia in the Model UN. What is that country's stand on global warming?ā
ā¢ āWhat's being done about HIV/AIDS in Cameroon?ā
ā¢ āIām doing a paper on the Igbo people and my teacher said youād have some stuff.ā
ā¢ āIām preparing a proposal to introduce solar cookers to villagers in Burkina Faso. I need information on solar cooking and heating in Africa, and also material on gender roles in rural Burkina.ā
ā¢ āIt Takes a Village to Raise a Child is supposed to be an African proverb. What language? What people?ā
ā¢ āLike, do you have anything on African drumming?ā
These are typical of the questions fielded daily by the staff of the African Studies Library (ASL) of Boston University. As a specialized department within the university library system, a major component of ASL's mission is to help researchers find the information and scholarship on Africa that they need. We are well equipped to do so. ASL is one of the oldest African studies libraries in the United States, with a collection of over 200,000 volumes, an array of electronic resources, and a staff of three librarians and two paraprofessionals who have among them expertise in African studies based on a combination of academic background, on-the-job experience, and continuing education.
Africa Is Not Just for Specialists
Questions similar to those in the introduction could be posed to any reference librarians at academic and public libraries nationwide, or formed into searches on the Web and electronic information resources by the researchers themselves. It is probably impossible to measure the extent of research on Africa in the U.S., but several figures suggest that a considerable number of people have an academic or personal interest in learning about Africa. The African Studies Association (ASA) http://www.africanstudies.org, the main professional organization of Africanist scholars, has 2,202 individual members belonging to 510 institutions and organizations worldwide. About 85% of these members reside in the United States. There are 489 institutional subscribers to ASA publications. The Association of African Studies Programs listed 55 U.S. institutions as members as of 1993 on its Web site: http://www.africanstudies.org/asa_aasp.html. The International Directory of African Studies Research (Baker 1994) included 115 U.S. institutions. The Directory of African and Afro-American Studies (Rana 1987) lists 388 universities and colleges offering courses on Africa and its diaspora. Based on these figures, it is reasonable to speculate that during any academic year there could be tens of thousands of students nationwide taking Africa-related courses and writing papers on African topics.
This estimate does not include pre-college students and non-academic researchers, whose numbers could be extensive as well. All institutions receiving federal Higher Education Act Title VI funds as national resource centers for Africa (eleven in 2002āsee http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/HEP/iegps/nrc.html) have outreach programs that promote and facilitate the study of Africa in the public schools and the community, and develop curriculum materials and lesson plans. Other institutions have similar programs without this federal assistance. Clearly, anyone might have questions about Africa, and any librarian may get a question about Africa at the reference desk, whether or not they have specialized resources on Africa.
Where Are the Specialist Librarians and What Do They Do?
The Africana Librarians Council (ALC) (http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/amed/9asa.html) of the African Studies Association is the major professional organization for specialist Africana librarians and, increasingly, librarians who have responsibilities for multiple subjects including Africa. Its approximately eighty members represent thirty libraries nationwide, primarily those with major research collections on Africa. Although many specialist librarians provide reference service and develop research tools on Africa, the principal duty for Africana librarians has been collection development. They focus particularly on scholarly, government and commercial publications from Africa, whose acquisition requires a great deal of attention. Thus, even at these institutions, the specialist Africana librarians may only be responsible for collection development, with reference service provided by more generalist staff. Boston University's African Studies Library is somewhat unusual: each staff member has responsibility for some combination of collection development and management, reference service and bibliographic instruction, cataloging, and Web page development. However, even though specialist Africana librarians may not provide direct reference service, they have been extremely active in creating reference and research tools such as bibliographies on a wide array of topics, and guides to Africana collections in libraries and archives.
Are Bibliographies Obsolete?
These service activities came under some scrutiny at the conference held on the 40th anniversary of the ALC, the proceedings of which have been published as Africana Librarianship in the 21st Century: Treasuring the Past and Building the Future (Schmidt 1998). In the section on reference and bibliographic instruction, Tom Johnsen, Social Science Librarian at the University of Bergen (Norway), advanced the idea that these narrow, tailor-made bibliographies no longer provide a useful service to researchers, since the major databases do a better job of guiding researchers to books and articles on their topics. He maintained that Africanist librarians should concentrate on teaching researchers how to use the major databases, and devote more energy to making available online the catalogs of those archives and library collections that are still only accessible in card catalogs or local computer systems. He also called on librarians to advocate for the digitization of the documents in those collections to expand access to scholars unable to visit the collections (Johnsen 1998: 67). While most of the audience agreed with Johnsen's second point, his assertion that major databases ādo the job betterā raised some controversy, with several librarians protesting that general indexes did not serve Africanist researchers well enough, and special bibliographies were a necessary service (Coelho 1998: 79).
Researchers Need More Help Than They May Realize
Specialists, generalist librarians, and end users all depend on tools designed to provide access to information in libraries and on the Web, including OPACs, databases, and search engines. How well do those tools work? How much information and scholarship on Africa is really accessible to researchers distant from the specialized collections? Indeed, how much information within those specialized collections is readily accessible to researchers? Can Web research on Africa substitute for library research? This paper will explore these questions by examining aspects of library and information service that affect successful research on Africa and describing some of the problems peculiar to African resources.
Library catalogs do not provide sufficient access to specialized materials in the collection. Some analyses indicate that over 90% of the information and scholarship in articles, works in series, essays in edited volumes, and the contents of collected works remain elusive (Tyckoson 1997: 11). If these works are not accessible in library catalogs, and are not in major databases, then specialized bibliographies may be the only way that they will ever be found. Moreover, the nomenclature and terminology particular to the study of Africa...
