2024 Newsletter

New funding phase 2024 – 2026

In 2024, the Specialised Information Service (FID) African Studies started its third funding phase and the German Research Foundation (DFG) will continue to fund the project for a further three years until the end of 2026. In these years we are planning new book acquisition trips (including to the Gaborone Book Festival in Botswana and the Foire internationale du livre de Lomé in Togo as well as the Salon du livre africain de Paris), an exciting cooperation on authority files from oral sources with the University of Hamburg and the National Centre for Arts and Culture (NCAC) in the Gambia, as well as new features in our portal, including direct subito and interlibrary loans, a geographic search and a completely new interactive researcher compass.

The acquisition of literature by publishers from the African continent and the African diaspora remains one of our central objectives. The FID works with a number of specialist distributors for print publications, including Hogarth for publications from Nigeria or Clarke’s for publications from South and Southern African. Additionally, in June 2024 we received a set of titles from Éditions Oubangui in the Central African Republic (pictured), which are not available through other distribution channels. We have also licenced an eBook package from the African Books Collective, which is being extended through the addition of over 700 new titles.

Additionally, towards the end of 2024 we organised and hosted a workshop for librarians working with African Studies collections across Germany in cooperation with the German Librarians’ Association (VDB) and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA). In addition to the invited colleagues, the online repository AfricArXiv, four regional Specialised Information Services (namely the FID Asia, the FID Middle East-, North Africa- and Islamic Studies as well as the FID Latin America, Caribbean and Latino Studies) presented their collections and services. In addition to the informative presentations, the workshop’s aim was also to strengthen cooperation as the subject librarians can publicise the services offered by the FID in their home institutions and beyond.

Visual analytics for the image archive of the German Colonial Society (VaBiKo)

Towards the end of 2024, a new DFG-funded project started at the Goethe University Library in cooperation with Professor Ralph Ewert (Technical Information Library, Hannover / Philipps-University Marburg): Visual analytics for the image archive of the German Colonial Society (VaBiKo). The image archive of the German Colonial Society at the Johann Christian Senckenberg University Library in Frankfurt houses one of the most important collections of photographs and publications of German colonial institutions, comprising approximately 55,000 image carriers. The project aims to improve access and usability of the German Colonial Society’s image archive for researchers, as enhanced access to content for scholarship will lay the foundation for the continued reappraisal of German colonial history.

This newsletter also appeared on pages 82-83 of the Annual Report 2024 of the Centre for Interdisciplinary African Studies (ZIAF) of the Goethe University Frankfurt.