According to estimates, Africa hosts about 2,000 of the approximately 6,000 languages of the world. This number makes the continent one of the hotspots of linguistic diversity. Essential description (i.e. grammars, dictionaries) and documentation (i.e. audio and video speech data and their annotations) is not even available for some of the largest among them. The overwhelming majority of African languages, irrespective of their endangerment status, have received only very little or no linguistic attention to date, despite the fact that many of them are spoken by millions as a first or second language. In addition, a large number of African languages are spoken by small-scale rural communities and can be classified as endangered on diverse grounds, ranging from displacement due to wars or climate change to rural exodus for socioeconomic reasons.

In 1994 around 800,000 Rwandan people were killed in a hundred days of genocide. The Aegis Trust, a genocide education charity, began collecting testimonies from survivors in 2004 and, in partnership with Kigali City Council, established a national memorial site and archive, known as the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. In addition to the testimonies, this Archive now houses a wide range of materials such as footage of Gacaca court proceedings and annual remembrance ceremonies, maps, historical photographs, colonial documents, propaganda literature, identification cards and other official documents. To increase the accessibility of these archival materials, on 10 December 2010, the Genocide Archive of Rwanda launched its own website (http://www.genocidearchiverwanda.org.rw). providing members of the international community with an opportunity to explore the digital database. As yet, the digital archive contains only a small number of the testimonies that have been recorded.

Francois Edmond Fortier (1862-1928) was undoubtedly the most prolific photographer working in French West Africa in the first decade of the 20th century. He produced well over 3300 photographs, almost all in postcard form. He was born in France and appears in Senegal around the year 1900. Unlike most of his predecessors who plied the photographic trade in the well established and well to do city of St. Louis, Fortier made his home in the new and expanding capital city of Dakar. He is best described as a “petit colon”, who succeeded in making a living as a professional postcard photographer/editor selling his work from a small Dakar shop and distributing postcards to the towns along the railway line. In later years local advertisements indicate that Fortier's shop catered to the military, bureaucratic, colonial population of the city, offering tobacco, stationary, Senegalese knick-knacks and postcards.

The National Archives of Malawi (NAM) is a member of the East and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council on Archives (ESARBICA), a regional body that presently comprises fourteen countries (Angola, Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zanzibar and Zimbabwe). The state of archives in the ESARBICA region varies from country to country owing to the fact that the countries are at different levels economically, politically and otherwise.

Essex Record Office (ERO) holds many collections containing stories of men and women who served during the First World War. The vast majority refer to men who were posted to the Western Front. However, a recently-deposited family collection included a diary and photographs, which revealed the experiences in an overlooked theatre of war of a motor cyclist with 26th Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps serving in British East Africa. This article is a case study based on the type of papers which can be found in local Record Offices.

The diary was written by Harry Joseph Edward Ripper who was born on 18 September 1897, the second son of Harry Tucker Ripper and Edith Sarah Ripper.

1994 was indeed an eventful year for South Africans in general and for the South African Muslims in particular. During the early part of April 1994 the Muslims celebrated the tercentenary of Islam in South Africa, and towards the end of that month they went to the polls along with other South African citizens to participate in South Africa's first democratic elections. It was thus a memorable experience for the Muslim community who joyfully expressed their national and religious identity respectively.

The South African Muslim community, particularly those who hailed from the province of the Western Cape, has always raised the question of identity. During the years of apartheid and before, the vast majority of them never identified themselves as South Africans since they rejected the legislated racial policies of the White minority regime. The Population Registration Act of 1950 divided the South Africans into four distinct categories, namely Whites, Indians, Africans, and Coloureds.

Naming is a universal cultural practice and in every society, names are given to children at birth. According to Wegryn (2008), a name is of distinction, chosen, conferred and announced. However, the way names are given, reasons for choice of particular names and the rituals involved in naming, vary from society to society. Birth is regarded among most African societies as the beginning of the rites of passage, which comprise birth, puberty, marriage and death, and all these are celebrated to show their significance. Among most Ghanaian communities, the newborn baby is kept away from public view for seven days and brought out on the eighth day during what is called the “outdooring ceremony”.

Preservation of heritage materials constitutes a big challenge to heritage institutions in Africa. The challenge of heritage preservation in the tropics seems to be overwhelming due to a number of factors which include the harsh tropical environment, absence of a preservation policy and general lack of preservation awareness and appreciation of the importance and sensitivity of heritage materials. The strategic role of preservation to the survival of and long term access to heritage materials cannot be over-emphasised. It not only prevents or delays deterioration but also ensures access. “Without preservation, access becomes impossible and collections will decay and disintegrate” (Drijfhout, 2001). The greatest obstacle to access is deterioration or loss of collection.

National heritage institutions such as the National Library, the National Archives and the National Museums are in the forefront in the preservation of heritage materials in Nigeria.

The struggle to liberate the continent of Africa from colonialism during the second half of the twentieth century represented an important epoch and, as such, this history needs to be documented in whatever form for the benefit of posterity and for all, irrespective of class, as the struggle for independence was a collective effort. Accordingly, east and southern Africa's liberation struggles have been well documented over the past few decades and the efforts are still ongoing and gathering momentum as a consequence of the onset of digital technologies as custodians of this heritage battle to move with the times in search of permanence. Custodians of this unique and irreplaceable heritage are mostly political parties that spearheaded the struggle for emancipation. Ironically very few of these liberation movements possess proper archives and much of the primary material such as manuscripts, letters, photographs, publications, tapes etc is in the custody of individuals’ private archives (Mazarire 2009).

In May 1963, discussions between the African Studies Association (U.S.), the Midwest Interlibrary Center (now Center for Research Libraries), and Africana librarians from twelve North American institutions helped create the Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP). Owing to the rise in digital information and preservation formats, CAMP renamed itself the Cooperative Africana Materials Project in 2010. Its mission has been to collect and preserve African newspapers, serials, and ephemera not typically held at U.S. institutions. As its original name suggests, microfilming continues to be an important method of preserving CAMP holdings. While building the collection involved some direct purchases of microfilm from Africa and Europe, the role of collaboration among U.S. and later African institutions enhanced collections and expanded the scope of CAMP's work. The history of these initiatives prior to 1995 has been documented by several CAMP members.

According to Ketelaar (1992:5) “archives - well preserved and accessible to the people - are as essential in a free democracy as government of the people by the people, for the people. Because archives are not only tools of the government, not only sources for historical research, access to public archives gives the people the possibility to exercise their rights and to control their governments, its successes, its failures.” The Dictionary of Archival Terminology defines access as “the availability of records or archives for consultation as a result of legal authorization and the existence of finding aids”. The same Dictionary defines privacy as “the right to be secure from unauthorized disclosure of information contained in records/archives relating to personal or private matters.” McCauseland (1993) on the other hand defines access to include “the terms and conditions of availability of records or information maintained by archives for examination and consultation by researchers”.

There is increased recognition of the vital role that scientific information and knowledge has to play in education, poverty reduction and sustainable development. The reverse case is also true – that unless access to information and knowledge is made available to all, the gap between poor and wealthy countries will continue to widen. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan has recently written of how the “unbalanced distribution of scientific activity generates serious problems not only for the scientific community in the developing countries, but for development itself. It accelerates the disparity between advanced and developing countries, creating social and economic difficulties at both national and international levels.”

Advances in technology, particularly in the areas of electronic publishing and dissemination, have led to new ways of communicating information and knowledge and thus present a huge range of opportunities for developed and developing countries alike. They also bring many significant challenges, which are nowhere perhaps more keenly experienced than in developing countries. In this paper I will outline some of the key challenges and also some of the important opportunities presented by the revolution in scholarly electronic publishing. I will illustrate this with examples of projects exploiting new technology to enhance access to information in developing and transitional countries and bridge the knowledge divide.

The paper examines the contributions that libraries in Ghana are making towards research and scholarship in the country. The libraries discussed are mainly academic and special libraries as it is the view of the writer that school and public libraries are so poorly developed as to provide any materials of value to scholarship and research. It is also the view of the writer that libraries in Ghana are not making adequate contributions to scholarship and research in large part because of inadequate funds and physical facilities.

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.

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.