Research Guides: AFST 350: Introduction to African Studies: Websites and Digital Collections

General Websites and Digital Collections

Africa: Historical Maps (Texas)
Historical African maps from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas-Austin
Africabib
Bibliography of African studies resources. Contains a number of databases including: Africana Periodical Literature, African Women, Women Travelers to Africa, Islam in Africa, Kenya Coast, Water and Africa, Education in Africa
Africa is a Country
"Africa Is a Country is a site of opinion, analysis, and new writing on and from the African left."
African, Jewish, and Middle Eastern Studies (LOC)
"This research guide provides a compilation of primary and secondary source materials, reference works, free and subscription databases, recorded programs and more, selected by curators in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division."
AfricanLII
"AfricanLII is a programme of the Democratic Governance and Rights Unit at the Department of Public Law, University of Cape Town. We help individuals, organizations, and governments build and maintain sustainable free access to law portals, and reach the people of Africa and beyond. We convene a network of 16 African LIIs - a collaborative group of organizations and individuals in Africa, dedicated to free access to law on our continent. Free Access to Law, or LII, websites are indispensable sources of legal information for the justice sector and citizens of the countries LIIs serve.
Africana and Black History Digital Collections at NYPL
New York Public Library's digital collection of Africana and black history items
African Activist Archive Project
Preserves records and memories of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s. Includes political buttons, posters, tee shirts, and other media.
African Development Bank
Website of the African Development Bank
African Digital Research Repositories
International African Institute's listing of institutional and subject repositories from Africa
African Index Medicus
In order to give access to health information published in or related to Africa and to encourage local publishing, the World Health Organization, in collaboration with the Association for Health Information and Libraries in Africa (AHILA), has produced an international index to African health literature and information sources.
The need for improved access to what has been published on health issues in African countries has long been felt by researchers, development agencies, health administrators and planners both inside and outside the continent. Very few African health and biomedical information sources are included in the world’s leading bibliographic databases and there is a wealth of untapped information in books, reports and studies from international development agencies, nongovernmental organizations and local institutions.
African Journals Online (AJOL)
"African Journals OnLine (AJOL) is the world's largest and preeminent platform of African-published scholarly journals."
African Online Digital Library
"AODL provides free universal access to cultural heritage materials from and about African countries and communities. It brings together tens of thousands of digitized photographs, videos, archival documents, maps, interviews and oral histories in numerous African languages, many of which are contained in curated thematic galleries and teaching resources."
African Studies Center Leiden Library
This unique African studies database contains titles of books, journal articles, films, online documents, and more. Many entries include professional in-depth abstracts. Access to the ASCL catalogue is available via the Leiden University Libraries Catalogue, both in a separate section, as well as in the general catalogue.
African Studies Center Leiden Publications
Browse 9 different series published by the African Studies Center Leiden or search them at https://www.ascleiden.nl/content/publications
African Studies Collection (Wisconsin)
"The African Studies Collection brings together primary and secondary resources; research and teaching materials created by University of Wisconsin faculty and staff; and unique or valuable items related to this field held by the University of Wisconsin Libraries."
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African Studies Collection
African Studies Digital Collections (Florida)
"The digital African Studies General Collections have been developed and managed to support the past, ongoing and future needs of University of Florida's Center for African Studies, one of the most active and well regarded such centers in North America and the only United States Department of Education Title VI Center for African Studies in the southeastern U.S. The African Studies Collection, from which this digital collection is drawn, is recognized as a unique resource within the University of Florida's George A. Smathers libraries, ranking among the best such collections in the U.S. Its holdings include disciplinary topics from the natural sciences and applied fields such as agriculture and public health, to the social sciences, humanities, and professions."
African Studies Internet Resources
WWW-Virtual Library for African Studies at Columbia
African Studies Library
"The African Studies Library project aims to build a state-of-the-art library catalogue and to provide research services for African Studies in Germany and beyond. This project is funded by the German Reseach Foundation (DFG) and hosted at the Goethe University Library in Frankfurt."
AfricArXiv
"AfricArXiv is a free community-led digital archive for African research. We provide a platform for African scientists to upload their working papers, preprints, accepted manuscripts (post-prints), and published papers. We also provide options to link data and code, and for article versioning. AfricArXiv is dedicated to speeding and opening up research and collaboration among African scientists and helping to build the future of scholarly communication."
Africa South of the Sahara
A great directory of links assembled by the Stanford University Library.
AGSL Digital Photo Archive - Africa
"AGSL Digital Photo Archive - Africa presents a selection of images from the extensive photographic holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library."
ALMA: African Language Materials Archive
The African Language Materials Archive, or ALMA, is a multi-partner project focusing on the promotion and documentation of literature and literacy in the languages of Africa.
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It further serves to assist African language authors and publishers in publicizing and distributing their work. It offers a publicly accessible online catalog and database, e-books, manuscripts, video and audio materials. Partners involved are the West African Research Center and the Title VI National Resources Centers. ALMA has two websites, 1.) an original site a section of the Digital Library for International where user can find African language literary documents and 2.)a complementary site, contains complementary materials including African language video recordings, documentary video, translation work, and bibliographies provided by Michigan State University’s MATRIX Project. The materials in this archive represent a wide range of genres and subject matter in Wolof, Mandinka, and Pular, the three major languages of Senegal and The Gambia in West Africa. They include: post-literacy materials (e.g. booklets on small enterprise activities, health, human rights, etc.); newspapers intended for, and sometimes edited by, the newly literate; religious materials (e.g. Koranic and Biblical texts); poetry; information on AIDS and its prevention; folktales and epics; African language translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; and articles on oral history and culture. Further additions to this archive are anticipated in the near future which will include materials in other West African languages and on other subjects.
Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives
History of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement 1959-1994
Bibliography of Slavery and World Slaving
The Bibliography of Slavery is a searchable database containing verified references (except as noted) to approximately 25,000 scholarly works in all academic disciplines and in all western European languages on slavery and slaving, worldwide and throughout human history, including modern times. It includes all known print materials published since 1900 in scholarly formats, as well as digital scholarly journals, recent unpublished presentations at academic conferences, professional historical sites, and major museum exhibitions and catalogs. The bibliography includes only works sufficiently focused on these subjects to feature references to them in their titles.
British Documents on the End of Empire
"Online platform for the British Documents on the End of Empire Project (BDEEP)."
Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR)
The Centre for Social Science Research (CSSR) is an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Cape Town dedicated to conducting and building capacity for systematic, policy-relevant social science research in South Africa, the region and across Africa. Methodologically, CSSR research is empirical, problem-driven and we utilise both quantitative and qualitative strategies of data collection.
Connecting Africa
"Connecting-Africa is a gateway to African research information produced worldwide." Created by African Studies Center Leiden
DAACS Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery
Learn more about enslaved Africans and their descendants living in the Chesapeake, Carolinas, and Caribbean during the Colonial and Ante-Bellum Periods. Analyze and compare archaeological assemblages and architectural plans from different sites at unprecedented levels of detail. DAACS is a community resource, conceived and maintained in the Department of Archaeology at Monticello, in collaboration with the research institutions and archaeologists working throughout the Atlantic World.
Database of African Theses and Dissertations and Research (DATAD-R)
Endangered Archives Programme-British Library
The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) facilitates the digitisation of archives around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration.
Herskovits Library of African Studies Digital Collections
Digitized collections from "the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University...the largest separate Africana collection in existence."
Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG)
Published since 2007, the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) assesses governance performance in 54 African countries over the latest available 10-year period. It provides a framework and dashboard for any interested audience to assess the delivery of public goods, services, and public policy outcomes in African countries. The IIAG provides comprehensive datasets that measure African governance, providing specific scores and trends at African continental, regional, and national level, on a whole spectrum of thematic governance dimensions, from security to justice to rights and economic opportunity to health.
Images of Colonialism
"These late-19th- and early-20th-century trade cards and illustrations offer insight into European perspectives on the colonial experience."
Internet African History Sourcebook
Ancient, medieval and modern African history sourcebook hosted by Fordham University
Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora
"The images in Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. Our growing collection currently has over 1,200 images."
Slave Societies Digital Archive
"The Slave Societies Digital Archive (formerly Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies), directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbilt University, preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and African-descended peoples in slave societies. SSDA holdings include more than 700,000 digital images drawn from close to 2,000 unique volumes dating from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries that document the lives of an estimated four to six million individuals. This collection contains the most extensive serial records for the history of Africans in the Atlantic World, and also includes valuable information about the indigenous, European, and Asian populations who lived alongside them."
Slave Voyages
"The SlaveVoyages website is a collaborative digital initiative that compiles and makes publicly accessible records of the largest slave trades in history. Search these records to learn about the broad origins and forced relocations of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships, and hundreds of thousands more who were trafficked within the Americas. Explore where they were taken, the numerous rebellions that occurred, the horrific loss of life during the voyages, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators, and much more."
University of London SOAS guide to African studies
Library guide from SOAS on African Studies
World Digital Library
Library of Congress' World Digital Library (indexed by place name)
World Legal Materials from Africa
Country-specific legal information from Cornell's LII portal
World Heritage Sites: Africa
JSTOR's "World Heritage Sites: Africa links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites. The materials in World Heritage Sites: Africa serve researchers in African studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, Diaspora studies, folklore and literature, geography, and history, as well as those focused on geomatics, advanced visual and spatial technologies, historic preservation, and urban planning."