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About the Collection
Although African studies is a relatively new discipline, the field has generated a large body of publications in the
past 45 to 50 years. Most of these of course were published in garden-variety ways, in sufficient copies to remain
reasonably available in today's much improved document-delivery environment. Nonetheless, there have been
exceptions--materials that were published in limited, sometimes very limited, quantities, but which have produced a
demand beyond the capacity of their initial print run to satisfy. In fact, fewer than ten copies were produced
of the titles indicated below by an asterisk.
Digitizing these then--and others like them--will significantly enhance their accessibility. More to the point, it will make it possible for researchers in Africa to secure access to them and thereby to circumvent--if only (so far) in a modest way--the longstanding and apparently indefinitely continuing "book famine." In a way, the present project could be seen as providing a template for further and future projects here and elsewhere. While no amount of digitizing to hope to overcome this shortage, strategically based projects throughout the western world can have a discernible impact on its effects.
Technical Note
Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):
- Hand-written texts;
- Texts that contain diacritics;
- Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
- Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
- Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.
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