Perhaps one of the least publicised and greatly under-utilised primary source materials in East Africa are the records of the defunct East African Community held at the Arusha International Conference Centre, Tanzania. These records document virtually every aspect of human life in Eastern Africa. By 1977, when the East African Community collapsed as a regional grouping of three partner states, namely Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, it had created vast quantities of records equivalent to that held in some of the national repositories in Africa. For over twenty years, these records have been in the custody of the Tanzania National Archives, which has made commendable efforts to ensure that this vital resource is not lost. In August 1998, the author led a team of specialists from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania mainland, Zanzibar and Lesotho to appraise, arrange, describe, box, and shelve these records. This article is based on information gathered during the workshop.

The paper describes the types of booksellers in Ghana, their problems, and the library's role as a partner with booksellers for enhancing the book trade in Ghana. The writer is of the view that the future of bookselling in Ghana does not appear gloomy. There are several ways in which libraries can help in promoting the book trade in Ghana, and attempts must be made to develop this partnership.

The new fifth edition of African Books in Print/Livres Africains Disponibles, (ABIP) has been in the making for some time. Initially plagued by persistent software problems with the database, publication of the new edition was further delayed because of many late responses by publishers verifying and updating records on file for their titles. Moreover, data gathering from Africa remains an uphill task, not made easier by serious communication problems and frequently unreliable postal services. However, after a rather prolonged hatching period, the new edition will now be published in May 2000. Happily, by virtue of the fact that the title database is constantly kept up-to-date through new listings in the quarterly African Book Publishing Record (ABPR), the delay in publication has not affected currency, and the fifth edition of ABIP will provide details of African books that are currently in print as at the end of 1999.

Special collections are library items that deserve or demand a kind of special treatment that the general stack area is unable to supply. Depending on the environment in which they exist, special collections provide unique and invaluable secondary and primary information resources that support research in many areas of human endeavour, provide the means for nurturing cultural diversity, and serve as mementos of national achievements and failures, which, cumulatively, provide the building blocks of human civilisation. In these important respects, special collections have wide national and international appeal to academics, students, officials, and the public at large. In Swaziland, a large proportion of special collections materials generally mirror the country's documentary heritage, though not exclusively so.