Between September 2008 and September 2009, IRD (Research Institute for Development) established a programme of scanning workshops within the SIST project (System for Scientific and Technical Information) of MAEE (French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs). This initiative involved documentation centers and libraries of public institutions (Universities, Research Institutes) in several French-speaking African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia).

The programme enabled the purchase of scanning equipment (fast A4 scanners, PCs, dedicated software) and training teams to digitise documents (theses, articles, books) produced by the staff (researchers, engineers, students) of participating institutions. The Greenstone software was chosen to provide access, over the Internet, to the collections of digital materials. All teams were trained in the installation, administration and use of this tool.

The collections made by the project participants consist of documents in pdf format. Metadata is made available either by incorporating existing bibliographic databases (usually in the CDS/ISIS format) or by direct input into the metadata fields of digital files. In the latter case, the metadata entries include document title, authors, publication date and subject.

The gradual opening of the Chamare Museum at Mua Mission over a period of many weeks during the mid-summer of 1997 most naturally reflected its prolonged periods of conception and gestation, exceeding thirty years and more in total. For such represents the period of time that the guiding light and moving spirit behind this truly epic work of ethnological scholarship, Claude Boucher, has been acquiring his deep knowledge, love and understanding of the complex, ritual-imbued lives of the surrounding Chewa, Ngoni and Yao peoples of central Malawi. As the culmination of this extended process of intelligent observation and detailed record, the Chamare Museum offers much that is surely unique in interpretation, organisation and presentation anywhere in Africa. Certainly Malawi has never seen the like, and no visit to Malawi can now be considered satisfactory or complete without the inclusion of the Mua Mission.

In July 2010 I discovered the National Archives (Kew, London) while working on a dual project: my doctoral thesis, and a grant awarded by the Olympic Studies Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland. My goal was to conduct a comparative historical analysis of the administrative and political colonial situations of the United Kingdom and France. I wanted to understand their influence on the integration of the former British and French colonies into the Olympic movement between the end of the Second World War (1945) and the hosting of the Olympic Games in London (1948) on the one hand, and colonial independence in Africa in the 1960s on the other, reflected at the IOC by the creation of the Committee for International Olympic Aid (CIOA) to help the new countries in the Third World.

My presentation divides into two parts. The first explains what BDEEP is in terms of how the project originated, how it is administered and financed and what it is (and what it is not) intended to achieve. The second looks more closely at the place of Africa within the project by explaining at greater length the contents of some of the volumes and by introducing a number of documents which will be included.

First then the background to the project. BDEEP has its origins in two earlier collections of published documents concerning the end of British rule in South and South-East Asia. The first is Constitutional Relations between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power, 1942-1947, which was edited by Professor Nicholas Mansergh and published in twelve volumes between 1970 and 1983 by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO).

Conferences on aspects of African literature are no longer the rarity that they were ten years ago. They are fairly frequently held under the auspices of such bodies as the African Literature Association of America or in African universities. Nevertheless, there had been for some years a felt need — expressed at these annual gatherings among other places — for the kind of assessment conference that would possibly re-direct criticism and discussion of African writing in the next few years. If such a conference was to take place then it would need to get away from the issues which had become commonplace at ordinary gatherings of Africanists: ‘what is African literature’, ‘are European critical standards the appropriate ones for evaluating it’ and ‘should the African writer be concerned with the past or the present’, for example.

The Lesotho Agricultural Sector Analysis (LASA) Project was undertaken by the Department of Economics of the University of Colorado for the Lesotho government, with the intention of developing ”… the capacity of the Government of Lesotho to design, implement and utilize sector analysis in their development planning efforts”. The project was to consist of three phases: One, a “start up” period of approximately ten months; Two, six months for the establishment of a team of economists and related personnel in Maseru, Lesotho; and Phase Three, the agricultural sector analysis, estimated to take twenty months. Phase One will be the one of direct concern to this article.

The object of Phase One was to set up a plan of work for the following two phases, and to develop a “knowledge base” with the primary purpose of serving the team, firstly in Colorado and later in Lesotho.

In the era of information explosion, published material is no longer the apanage of specialized journals. Researchers in all fields — and African literature is no exception — must gather data that are scattered in eclectic publications. For instance, three journals that do not specialize in literature recently published the following articles: Teisseyre, Ch. ‘Interrogation sur la littérature africaine d'expression francaise'. Revue Francaise d'Histoire du Livre 48 (1979): 805-811; Yaek'Olingo, Wufele. ‘Brefs regards sur l'image de l'autorité post-coloniale dans le roman africain de langue francaise’. Genève-Afrique 19 (1) (1981): 103-122; Menga, Guy. ‘Expérience d'un dramaturge: l'essor du théâtre moderne au Congo’. Ethnopsychologie 35 (2-3) (April-Sept. 1980): 81-86. In this study, several interdisciplinary indexes which cover journals pertaining to francophone African literature (including but not limited to, monographs, collective works, dissertations, and proceedings of conferences) are analyzed and compared in terms of their coverage, relevancy and currency.

The online searching of databases to retrieve bibliographical information is increasingly becoming common research practice in a wide range of disciplines. For the scholar of African studies there is as yet no single comprehensive database covering the literature from the continent on a multi-disciplinary basis; however there are a number of existing databases which serve as a useful and up-to-date bibliographical tool. The aim of this paper is briefly to outline those currently available databases which are of relevance to African studies and to offer some suggestions as to how this valuable service may best be utilised.

Online information retrieval services first became readily available to the public in the early 1970s, chiefly in the area of science and technology.

A common element in all African studies is the background of the African environment. My first real sight of Africa, thirty years ago, was in the long train journey from Lagos to Zaria. As a botanist, I was fascinated then by the changing patterns of vegetation — different kinds of forest and savanna, a rich diversity of plant species. I suppose all members of our Association have seen something of Africa's vegetation and, especially on long journeys, may have thought it monotonous and dull. However, as with all forms of scholarly inquiry, what at first sight seems uniform becomes, on close inspection, a puzzling jumble, and only after a fair amount of study do meaningful patterns and causal relationships emerge. My interest was aroused by that very obvious part of the African environment and over the years I found that my vegetational studies were often relevant to researchers in quite different disciplines.

Since the turn of the millennium a crop of travel books by Africans or Africans in diaspora describing their travels within Africa have appeared to assert a fresh African self-representation in travel writing. Noo Saro-Wiwa's travel book Looking for Transwonderland (2012) tells the story of British-Nigerian journalist and travel writer Saro-Wiwa's travels around Nigeria for the first time since the death of her father Ken Saro-Wiwa. Looking for Transwonderland describes Saro-Wiwa's journey all over Nigeria, from Lagos to the north via the east and southwest, including a stop in her father's village in Ogoniland. Saro-Wiwa represents herself as a pioneer, one of the first travel writers of western-published, tourist-oriented travel writing about a country which in global tourism terms is “this final frontier that has perhaps received fewer voluntary visitors than outer space” (p.8).

Most of the issues that relate to information, publishing and libraries in contemporary Africa go back further than is generally realised. Summing up the proceedings of a conference on textbook provision and library development that took place in Manchester in 1991, an Overseas Development Administration spokesman said that ‘the obvious and immediate needs are to develop the skills of indigenous writers, build vibrant local publishing industries, and allocate more funds overall to providing textbooks and library books.’ Yet this is what one organisation - the East African Literature Bureau - had been attempting to do from its inception in 1948. Speaking at a Unesco seminar at Ibadan in 1953 the Bureau's director said its fields of activity included: ‘(a) textbooks for schools; (b) general literature and the tutoring of African authors; (c) the publication of a magazine; (d) the development of libraries; (e) the establishment of a business section with a publishing fund to develop the sale of the Bureau's publications and assist in the general development of bookselling.’

A most useful introduction to archive and manuscript collections in Europe and America as well as in Africa was contributed by P. Duignan to the Nairobi conference in 1967 and is published in The Bibliography of Africa, ed. Pearson and Jones, pp. 194—213.

The series of ‘Guides to materials for West African history in European archives’ being produced by the University of London Institute of Historical Research numbers four volumes up to the time of writing: