In terms of African scholarly resources, the new millennium has begun much as the last ended. Book and journal famines, limited Internet connectivity outside capital cities, and continuing brain and document drains that sap the resources and morale of African scholars and libraries. Co-operation among Africana librarians and between scholars and information workers thus has never been more urgent. The author reports on several important new projects focusing on electronic scholarly communication, publishing, and information resources, including the African e-Journals Project, African Journals Online, and the African Online Digital Library. He also draws attention to the contradictions and ethical issues apparent in some Western collecting practices, for instance the deployment of Western financial muscle to acquire African collections.

The Pan-African conference held in London in 1900 was a key moment in the early history of Pan-Africanism. Though the Pan-African Association (PAA) that emerged from it was short lived, the conference was the precursor of subsequent Pan-African conferences or congresses in 1919, 1921, 1923, 1927 and 1945, the last of which laid the groundwork for the advent of the African independence movements of the second half of the twentieth century. W. E. B. Du Bois, who dominated organisational Pan-Africanism later in the century, tended to minimise the significance of the 1900 conference, but he conceded that it “put the word ‘Pan-African’ in the dictionaries for the first time”. The 1900 conference established the idea, basic to Pan-Africanism, of African people and people of African descent uniting globally and leading the movement for their own liberation.

In the first part of this article we showed that evidence from the Colenso papers, held at the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House in Oxford, together with other sources, throws new light on the role of Frank Colenso, the second son of Bishop Colenso, in the African Association, the Pan-African Conference of 1900 and the Pan-African Association (PAA) that grew out of the conference. We now consider the part played by Frank Colenso in the dissolution of the PAA in 1901 while its secretary, Henry Sylvester Williams [see fig 1], was in the Caribbean. We are able to throw new light on the attempt by Williams to revive the organisation and offer an alternative interpretation to that provided in the contemporary record of the dissolution that most historians have relied on.

Environmental history projects using repeat photography often involve the acquisition of large collections of historical and current images, matching those images for comparative analysis, and then cataloguing and archiving the imagery for long-term storage and later use (Webb et ah, 2010). When used in combination with other techniques, repeat photography is an excellent tool for documenting change (Gruell, 2010) and has been used in a variety of disciplines, including historical ecology, to determine changes in plant populations, soil erosion, climate trends and ecological processes to name a few. Historical photographs often provide greater temporal range to an analysis compared to, for example, satellite imagery and in many cases even aerial photography (Gruell, 2010).

A National Sound Archive by its very nature has a particularly important role to play in the documentation and preservation of traditional music. “Traditional’ is used here to refer to those musical cultures which are primarily unwritten and therefore are passed down through oral tradition; this includes the ‘folk’ music of Europe and the Americas as well as most kinds of music from Africa and Asia. Such music is inadequately preserved through Western notation, which has no symbols for aspects of performance style essential to the understanding of traditional music. The audio recording, on the other hand, captures those aspects, and thus provides the main source of material for the study of traditional music. Without recordings, a large part of the world's musical cultures would be undocumented and probably unknown outside the country of origin. It is the role of a sound archive to acquire, preserve and make available this important and unique resource.

Since the introduction of a national orthography in 1972 books and articles by Somali authors have been finding their way on an increasing scale into library catalogues in universities and centres of learning outside Somalia. Somali author entries are likely to present some difficulty for cataloguers and library users not acquainted with the Somali cultural background, and these brief notes are offered in the hope that they will be of some use to them.

As in many other Muslim countries, surnames are not normally used in Somalia. Instead, a person is identified by a sequence of names which begins with the given name, followed by the name of his or her father and sometimes also by the name of his or her grandfather. This is reminiscent of the system used in Arabic, except that the words corresponding to ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ are omitted.

This article is an attempt to chart the chronology of a Library crisis and rescue, a crisis which attracted much attention from the national and professional press. It is very much a personal account. Others would tell it differently. It is an unashamedly partial account. Partial in both senses. There are some aspects of the story I do not know. I did not share in all the deliberations of the great and good and of the mercenary, muddled and misguided, which brought the Library to the brink of disaster and back and then to Cambridge. It is partial, because I find it difficult to be objective about this Library, which has always had the capacity to rouse strong emotions in its custodians and users - which is one of the reasons for its survival.

For several decades, members of the Colenso family conducted a vigorous humanitarian campaign across two continents, keeping in touch and exchanging information with one another between England and Natal. Prolific writers, continuously immersed in the often frenetic day to day activity of their campaigning work, they had little time to consider preserving for the future the vast amount of correspondence and documentation they produced. The result is that much of their prodigious output survives today only by chance, dispersed between different collections in the United Kingdom and South Africa.

The Colenso papers are authored not by an individual but severally by the members of a family, the family of John William Colenso, the first Bishop of Natal, his brother in law, his wife, their five children and two daughters in law.

Photography which has traditionally been classified as “ethnographic” or “anthropological” has received considerable attention in recent years and some of the major contributions to the field have been on African images, presenting analytical histories of photographic production and use, for instance Geary's analysis of photographs of Bamum in the Cameroon Grassfields (1988). I am not going to review this literature or the particular issues raised by it as there have been various such useful exercises, for instance Geary (1991) and Roberts (1988); nor am I going to consider the merits of specific collections because this would merely regurgitate much of what was said on the subject, and subsequently published (Roberts 1989a), during a two day seminar convened by Andrew Roberts which took place at S.O.A.S. London in 1988.

The connections between our work as librarians, archivists or scholars of Africa and the structural foundations of research (in the form of archives, documentation, and publications) we often take for granted. This paper focuses on our ethical responsibilities towards acquisition of Africana, but the principles proposed as ethical guidelines are applicable to other kinds of research, such as fieldwork. I first discuss ethical questions in general and then address how ethics relates to African studies and Africana librarianship. I discuss related problems such as what I term the African “document drain.” In a forthcoming ARD article (Limb 2002c), I elaborate upon these themes with particular emphasis on how emerging new models of partnerships, together with new electronic tools, might help mitigate such problems.

Missionary periodicals are like librarians. They have an image problem. People think they are boring. Like librarians, they spent a lot of time agonising over their image. Their editorials were full of complaints that even regular church and chapel goers are ill-informed and indifferent to foreign missions and regard missionary magazines as uninteresting. They were constantly exhorting their readers to go out and sign up more subscribers. If the missionary magazines had a problem in their own time, it was a long time before scholars took them seriously as source material. Scholars tended to think of them, if they thought of them at all, covered in a pietistic haze, of interest only to committed missionary antiquarians. All this is changing. I do not have to convince readers of ARD that librarians are not boring; I hope to convince you that missionary periodicals are not boring either.

Death in the Ghanaian society is regarded as one of the rites of passage that mark the transition from the present world to the other. It is believed to extend family relationship into infinity and therefore great effort is put into organising befitting funerals. In planning the funeral, a document, which the paper calls the funeral brochure, is prepared. These funeral brochures have become a valuable source of historical, social and biographical information. This article examines 107 Ghanaian funeral brochures belonging to all classes of people in the society, printed between 1993 and 2006. It provides insight into the various pieces of information contained in these brochures that qualify them as a rich source of biographical information. The paper concludes by calling on librarians to begin acquiring funeral brochures as part of their collections.

There may appear to be little point in an “outsider” attempting to write about the censorship of the historical record. Those employed to vet official records in Great Britain perform their task behind closed doors; and since even the titles of the files they continue to withhold are often kept a secret, scholars have little opportunity to question their decisions. As editor of the Central Africa volume of the British Documents on the End of Empire project (BDEEP), my own status is certainly that of an outsider. Established in 1987, BDEEP seeks to make available an edited and annotated selection of British government documents from The National Archives (TNA), formerly the Public Record Office, charting developments in colonial policy during the decolonisation era. Yet although its volumes are published by the Stationery Office, BDEEP is emphatically not an official publication.

A number of recent developments in South Africa both on the political front and on the literary scene, could be termed ‘radical’, depending on one's own political and literary perspectives. I myself, for example, am not enthusiastic about the so-called radical reform of South Africa's parliamentary system, which has been much in the news lately. Although this move will give a tiny minority of black South Africans a limited form of representation in parliament, it seems to me to leave the essential power structures untouched. To members of the ultra-right wing political parties, on the other hand, this move appears to threaten the very foundations of white civilisation, and should be resisted at all costs.

This article describes the work of the Jalada Translation Project in promoting translation into and between African languages through networking, social media, print and digital publishing and in confronting issues of orthography and editorial process. The terms of debate have changed and multilingual publication is becoming more commonplace. The author asks where responsibility lies for African language publishing and raises questions for government policy and African philanthropy.