The Africa Bibliography has been published by the International African Institute (IAI) as a print volume since 1985. The first editor was Hector Blackhurst, a social anthropologist turned academic librarian at the University of Manchester. In the inaugural volume, Jacob F. Ade Ajayi, the then Chairman of the International African Institute wrote that ‘Greater technical experience will, it is hoped, facilitate typographical improvements'.1 A second concern of the Bibliography, as expressed by Ajayi, was to monitor and record material produced in Africa ‘that does not always circulate widely and might otherwise escape notice’.2

With the publication of this, the 2012 volume, the online Africa Bibliography will hold just over 88,000 entries, dating from between 1990 and 2012. Nearly 55,000 additional archival entries remain in production, which together promise to enrich the online Bibliography's coverage of the period 1990–96 as well as take it back to 1984 and the origins of the print series. The transition of these records from the printed page to the online database involves a painstaking process – with each entry scanned, copyedited and individually tagged to support searching – but this work is providing a multiplicity of opportunities to enhance the intellectual value of the Bibliography and better achieve, in a contemporary context, the principles on which the Bibliography was launched thirty years ago.