2021 Newsletter
New portal of the Specialised Information Service (FID) African Studies
The year 2021 was dedicated to the development of the new portal, the African Studies Library, which will be online at www.africanstudieslibrary.org as of January 2022. The core of this portal is the catalogue search. All catalogues of German universities with African Studies centres have been integrated via the GVI (Gemeinsamer Verbündeindex). International catalogues, such as those from the African Studies Centre Leiden and the Nordic Africa Institute Uppsala, will be added gradually. In addition, over 110 repositories of African universities will be integrated via BASE (the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine). This will create a central location for searching and finding literature for African Studies.
The African Studies Library also offers suggestions for similarity on a serendipity basis. These are designed to simulate online (through knowledge graphs) how one might find other relevant titles while browsing through library shelves while searching for a particular book. In addition to the catalogue search, the portal also offers new services and functionalities. The African Studies Toolbox is now available on the new portal. On the news page you will find a central point of contact for information on conferences, webinars and job offers on Africa-related research. The African Studies Library newsletter provides information on new functions, new licences, new catalogues, news from the toolbox, acquisitions and much more.
The acquisition of literature from the African continent and the African diaspora remains a central task of the FID. In addition to the print acquisitions of publications from African publishers, almost 1,500 e-books from the African Books Collective were made available nationwide in 2021, hosted by the Goethe University Library under an FID licence. All interested researchers in Germany can register free of charge. Further information can be found on the Licence pages of the African Studies Library.
Network for sustainable research structures for holdings from colonial contexts
The Network for Sustainable Research Structures in Colonial Contexts celebrated its first anniversary this year. The number of participants in the biannual network meetings has doubled during this period. Five working groups have also been established, including the working group for international cooperations, the working group for third-party funding, the working group for thesauri, the working group for research tools as well as the 3-way strategy working group, which supports institutions participating in the 3-way strategy of the ‘Contact Point for Cultural Property from Colonial Contexts’.
The handling of collections from colonial contexts remains an important topic at the Goethe University Library. In 2021, we continued our conservation projects for the image collection of the German Colonial Society and library staff took part in numerous conferences and workshops on these issues. Some of the central questions include: How can the images be presented without reproducing the colonial gaze? What can sustainable instruments for centralised documentation of collection items from colonial contexts look like? How can the so-called 'societies of origin' be involved? And what does restitution mean for colonial photographs?
This newsletter also appeared in German on pages 84-85 of the Annual Report 2021 (Jahresbericht 2021) of the Centre for Interdisciplinary African Studies (ZIAF) of the Goethe University Frankfurt.