The Cooperative African Newspapers Project is an initiative of the Africana Librarians Council (ALC) of the African Studies Association (ASA) and the Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP) of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to enhance the utilization of newspapers as a source of information about Africa.
The Cooperative African Newspapers Project explores issues related to the preservation of this inherently ephemeral and fragile form of publication and access to contents through both traditional and new technologies.
The project phases will include:
• creation of the African Newspapers Union List, a centralized
finding aid for African newspapers held in North American libraries
and elsewhere;
• preservation of these fragile resources through microfilming
of titles existing only on paper; and
• digitization of the content of newspapers, facilitating research
on African political, economic, and cultural events.
The first phase of this project has resulted in the development of the
African Newspapers Union
List (AFRINUL), a centralized electronic database of holdings information
for newspapers (all formats and all languages) published in sub-Saharan
Africa. AFRINUL currently consolidates holdings information for collections
in North America, and will later expand to include holdings in Africa,
Europe, and elsewhere.
For some time, AFRINUL has included only holdings of the Cooperative Africana Microform Project, the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), and holdings reported in the most recent edition (1999) of “African Newspapers Currently Received by American Libraries”.[1] Participants of the project have been gathering information on their own collections, but a low-barrier approach to entering information into the collaborative database was slow in developing. A major step forward occurred when the AFRINUL administrative tool became ready for testing. In August 2004, testing with a limited number of titles from Northwestern University’s extensive newspaper holdings of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies took place.
The administrative tool allows authorized participants to add, edit, and remove bibliographic and holdings information relating to their local collections. Utilizing a simple Web-based interface, users can input a conglomeration of information (standard bibliographic fields, contextual information, combined holdings of print, microform, or electronic issues) into an aggregated record. The information is immediately posted to the public search interface of AFRINUL.
Subsequent phases of the project will include initiatives in the areas of preservation, digitizing, and indexing. Participants include institutions represented by the membership of the ALC and CAMP, in conjunction with CRL.
[1] "African Newspapers Currently Received by American Libraries,"
first issued as an ALC project in 1975, was compiled by Mette Shayne,
Northwestern University, and is available via the CRL website.
