Documenting & Researching Southern Africa in New Contexts: a Symposium in Honour of Carl Schlettwein Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 12-14 May 2000 Changing traditions and new challenges at SOAS Barbara Turfan Librarian – African Studies Section, SOAS, University of London SOAS was founded as a constituent college of the University of London during the First World War, supporting research students and scholars and training colonial civil servants in the languages and cultures of Asia and Africa. The Library always occupied a central place in the institution; the intention, from the very start, was that the Library should serve not only the staff and students of the School but also develop as a national library for the study of Asia and Africa. That tradition has continued and expanded, with SOAS Library a recognized national and renowned international resource for the study of the humanities and social sciences in Asia and Africa - including a great deal in and on the indigenous languages of the regions covered. SOAS Library therefore has a multiple role and manifold responsibilities. Its primary commitment must be, naturally, to its own students - now as many undergraduate as graduate. Provision must be made for the School's post-graduate and academic research. Access by the British higher education community, always a key aspect of the Library's service, is now more than ever justified in terms of qualifying for external funding. As an international centre for research, the Library is often almost busier during the summer vacation months than during term-time, as scholars from all over the world arrive - some for short intensive visits, others for the duration, and many as regular summer visitors year after year. The picture, then, is one of dedicated and uninterrupted scholarship over the decades by myriads of students and researchers, supported by an enthusiastic and scholarly library staff bent on obtaining and providing an exemplary collection of books and periodicals. Would that things were so simple. Of course, in many ways this is the case and always has been. Our specialist staff are qualified in both the library profession and at least one discipline relating to the regions they work on, particularly the languages; many of us studied at SOAS or similar universities elsewhere. Yet change is all around us - in terms of students, of teaching practice, of funding, of the availability of resources and access to them, of developments in technology ... SOAS Library and its staff are not immune to these changes and their ramifications. There is a constant pressure on library staff, as on all professionals, to keep up with change, to learn new skills, to try to continue to offer the same quality of service but within a substantially new context. One of the biggest and most obvious changes at SOAS since I was a student there in the 1970s is in the student body and the way the students are taught. The rapid, state-encouraged, increase in the number of British school-leavers attending university has had a major impact. SOAS had a long tradition of post-graduate research, plus a sprinkling of undergraduate and master's students with a strong commitment to the region they had come to study. Suddenly the balance shifted massively in favour of undergraduates - and later, one-year Master's students - as quotas for admittance were set by government within a prescribed time-span and with not un- influential financial inducements (or penalties, depending on how you look at them). The short- term result was chaos as class sizes changed from less than a dozen to anything between fifty and a hundred students for the more popular courses in, for example, anthropology. Teaching practice was forced to change almost overnight as the few existing large classrooms were fought over and lecturers found themselves unable to teach in their own offices. For the Library, the time-honoured policy of purchasing one copy of any book (or occasionally two) and concentrating one's efforts principally on building up a broad, representative research collection vanished into history as we ordered multiple copies of key texts on reading lists and still faced complaints of insufficiency by students. A Teaching Collection for use only by SOAS students was installed with short-term borrowing - to ensure that at least one copy of any core text was readily available and to protect our own students from the predations of visiting scholars who might want the same books! At the same time, in order to keep up to date with modern trends in scholarship and to attract students, more and more courses were launched with more and more attendant reading lists, relating to a wider and wider range of subjects (often multi- or inter-disciplinary, or supra- continental). Examples include the Caribbean, water resources, gender, environmental and development studies, which were not traditionally within the Library acquisitions policy and for which we therefore had very little existing stock. The choice was stark - either we refuse to collect beyond the titles cited in the reading-lists until the Library's acquisitions remit be revised (and the book-fund hopefully increased) by the School, or we begin to collect more widely with the inevitable consequences for our already over-stretched budget. Turning specifically to the African Studies Section of the Library, the proliferation of events in that continent over the last decade or so - political, social, economic - have stimulated and are still stimulating intense interest so that the highest number of students, courses and academic staff at SOAS relate to Africa. The implications for the Section in terms of funding, book and periodical acquisition and processing, book movement to and from the shelves, enquiry work and so on are not insignificant. Several years ago a major reconsideration of the spread of the Library's book-fund across the regional sections was instigated for the first time in many years. As a result - and on the basis of some solid background research and supporting argument - the ratios of the book-funds to the Sections were substantially altered, with the Africa and Islamic Middle East Sections now receiving the largest shares. Consequent on this little victory, even more time is now spent by my Middle East colleague and me on selection and acquisition, processing and management of stock - needless to say, without a concomitant increase in staff. Yet, there are technological developments which can help us to use our increasingly valuable time more efficiently. SOAS Library has long been automated for circulation and later cataloguing. In 1999 we changed from LIBERTAS to a new library system, INNOPAC Millenium, which is windows- and PC-based rather than DOS-based. The immediately obvious advantages to users are that our catalogue is accessible on the World Wide Web as well as through Telnet - which means that more users can remotely access us instead of travelling in "blind" or telephoning to ask about particular items or subjects. An advantage to cataloguers is that we can open up as many windows as we need while we work and access OCLC, e-mail, Netscape and so on without having constantly to exit and re-enter. Yet one important by-product of automation is that once material becomes apparent to users on an automated catalogue, demand increases not only by internal but also by external users who have accessed the catalogue remotely. This increases the burden on service provision (such as access to closed collections by day visitors), as well as adding to the wear and tear on books. As librarians, we have probably all felt at one time or another the conflict between the provider's satisfaction at stock being discovered and used by scholars and the custodian's dismay. Perhaps the principal advantage to librarians of any on-line system is that we can download more catalogue entries from outside sources (notably OCLC) instead of doing all our own original cataloguing. Of course, a collection such as ours includes a substantial amount of material that we cannot trace and download from any other source; we must therefore continue to invest time and effort in original cataloguing, but at least we can minimize this. Similarly, on changing from LIBERTAS to INNOPAC, we decided to take the plunge and adopt US Marc in our cataloguing instead of getting bogged down in the minutiae of editing record codes to accord with UK Marc. The sustaining argument was simple - if we are adopting an international standard record, why change it except where absolutely necessary (such as the subject classification to fit our own modified Dewey)? A further innovation with massive implications is our purchase of the Acquisitions and Serials modules of INNOPAC, so that we are finally moving away from the restrictions of our old manual systems for these. Now, for the first time, we have an on-line record for any item from the date when it is ordered. This will save an immense amount of staff time and effort. In the past, the time-span between a book being ordered, catalogued, labelled and shelved could be several months or more; meanwhile, users would ask for the book and staff would have to search for it - a time-consuming and much-repeated task which was frustrating both for the user and for the staff. Moreover, the introduction of automated acquisitions will have implications, as yet not fully worked into policy, for purchasing and selection as we move towards fewer and larger suppliers rather than the current diversity of small-scale, specialist suppliers. The conflict here will be between economy in purchasing, especially for a Library like ours which buys from all over the world in a variety of currencies, and the valuable local or subject knowledge and provision of more obscure material possible only through the specialist. Subscription to serials has been a serious and growing problem. The Library's annual acquisitions budget does not always increase even in line with inflation, let alone the massive rate of increase in serials subscription charges. For some years our policy has been to subscribe to a new title only when an existing one has been cancelled or become defunct. Or we subscribe only to those serials recommended as essential for teaching or research at SOAS, so long as the title is not held in another library nearby. But new journals appear constantly – even though many of the African ones fail to last more than a few issues. A Library such as SOAS has a responsibility to collect not merely the major or significant titles but also the less well-known titles published in Africa, those in African vernacular languages, in a few cases those which comprise one of the few titles published by an entire country. Other specialist and academic libraries in Britain, with their own financial constraints, increasingly leave those to SOAS and purchase only the mainstream titles. But SOAS Library has a responsibility to collect the major or significant titles, we cannot ignore them simply because other libraries in the vicinity stock them; otherwise we cannot realistically be considered the centre of African studies in the UK. One massive advantage of the new technology is that, increasingly, major serials in a variety of fields are becoming available electronically, full-text. The Library is a subscribing member of JSTOR, a digital archive collection of scholarly journals from their first issues up to a moving wall of between one and seven years; students can therefore browse, search and print any article from the collection at SOAS; this, however, is not very useful for Africa. INASP (the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications) produces African Journals Online which promotes Africa-published scholarly journals, chiefly scientific and agricultural through the Internet. Some individual journals are published on-line instead of or as well as in print (such as the Internet Journal of African Studies). One would expect that substantial savings would accrue in terms of subscription costs to serial titles, binding and conservation costs of large volumes and the amount of sheer space required to house long runs of journals. But, as always, nothing is as simple as it first appears. In general, access to full-text journals on-line is only possible if a library already subscribes to the print version – and most libraries are holding on to their print runs in addition to the on-line version. The chief benefit lies in the multiplication of access points and reduction of wear and tear (largely through photocopying) on the print version. But there are problems here too: the on-line version may be accessible only from within the subscribing library, additional software (such as Adobe Acrobat) may be required to read and download the full-text, networked printers may well need to be purchased and installed and, simply, there are just too many different ways of accessing on-line journals (such as through BIDS, Cambridge Journals Online and Catchword). A related issue which the Library is currently looking at, and working out a policy for, is that of the purchasing and cataloguing of electronic publications – books, series and serials - by organizations such as the British Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the World Bank and the Canadian International Development Research Center. Two problems are immediately apparent. First, we must compare the advantages and disadvantages of temporary (how temporary?) access to an on-line text with the permanence of a publication in print. Secondly, we must consider the copyright question concerning the right of a library to download on-line publications, catalogue them and make them available for users, or to create a permanent catalogue link to the web-site for students to access and download material as they wish. Where an organization publishes both in print and on-line, we must decide on a standard policy for the whole Library, since the individual Regional Sections are decentralised and fairly autonomous in book selection and acquisition, and establish who would place the order, make the catalogue link and monitor the web-site. This policy debate in SOAS Library is not yet resolved. At SOAS, we have an Enquiry Desk which is the first point of reference for users with virtually any kind of enquiry, directional or informational. The Enquiry desk staff also offer frequent demonstrations of on-line resources for students and staff, some of them tailored (by request) for specific courses or subjects, and produce an in-house Electronic Information Bulletin providing regularly updated information on new or useful sources. Among the informational type of enquiry, these days as much recourse is made to remote resources as to our own catalogue. We provide access to a number of on-line services: ? traditional data-bases (such as individual library catalogues) ? full-text (such as JSTOR and IngentaJournals) ? indexes of journal articles and reviews (such as IBSS and the Quarterly Index to Periodical Literature: Eastern and Southern Africa) or primary source material such as statistics (World Bank Indicators) ? search engines (such as AltaVista, Lycos and Yahoo!) ? Africa-related search engines (such as WoYaa!) ? subject gateways (such as BUBL for development studies and SOSIG for social science) ? Africa-related gateways (such as Yenza and South of the Sahara: Selected Internet Resources and the African Digital Library On-Line – this last is a library of full-text books provided by publishers and available free of charge to users in Africa) Some of these resources are freely available to all (such as on-line library catalogues), some are by subscription (such as BIDS) - which we pay for our own students and staff only and therefore cannot offer to external users. In the case of subject or regional gateways which, unlike search engines, are subject to assessment and "quality control" before appearing on the Internet, there may be a role for specialist librarians at SOAS and elsewhere in the new technology – an example of an old skill in a new context. We sometimes feel that SOAS Library has been slow to adopt new technological developments and resources, but in fact we have merely been cautious, knowing that they are often rather limited in coverage for the regions of Asia and Africa we specialize in. An example, however, of SOAS Library's own services to electronic data-base provision is Biblioline's African Studies. This began life as a CD-Rom and only recently switched to an on-line format – a move I personally believe will become the norm over the next few years, especially for studies on or emanating from Africa as initiation, maintenance and access are so much easier and cheaper. SOAS Library contributes all its automated catalogue records relating to Africa to African Studies. Thus, our catalogue is not only accessible direct on the World Wide Web but also through this commercial on-line data-base held by libraries all around the world (along with its sister publication, South African studies. SOAS Library's Web-page includes a list of "links" to remote sites and resources of particular interest or use, both general and regionally specific, which users may click on as a short-cut [Hand out print-out from Library home-page]. One particularly interesting and useful site is that of the African Studies Collection on Indiana University Bloomington Library's web-page, with its Websites for Africanists and Nancy J. Schmidt's bibliographical essay on African Resources for Undergraduates. Digitisation of library catalogues is a topic much under discussion and often requested, especially by students and researchers in more distant parts of the world who cannot always afford to travel. Consequent on easier remote access by such researchers is the frustration they face when, having located material they need, they find they cannot actually see it without travelling to the host institution in whichever continent that might be. Pressure for digitisation (or full-text on-line availability of material) of library holdings is growing and is likely to be the next major issue facing libraries. Yet digitisation is very expensive process - and many libraries (including my own) are still some way even from automating their catalogues fully, let alone the texts of all the books and journals in those catalogues. Moreover, the thorny issue of copyright is one which libraries and publishers will surely be arguing over for many years to come. That said, the question of digitisation is particularly significant for "holdings" libraries such as SOAS where much of the library stock is unique or out of print. The "holdings versus access" debate is still very much a live one. A balance has to be made between direct access to original material, with all the damage that heavy use can inflict and the service that libraries have to provide, and "virtual" access, or on-line access to full texts. Another area where IT can and will make a contribution is in co-operation between libraries. It is so much easier for researchers to use links posted up on a library's web-page to other institutions and specialist societies than to try to contact specialist librarians to ask their advice on where else to visit. The flip-side is the maintenance of home-pages, the constant need to check and up-date other web addresses, and monitor the appearance of new sites and disappearance of existing ones - though there is software available which will check out-of-date information. Librarians as well as researchers can benefit from the numerous email discussion groups and specialist networks, such as H-AFRICA. When discussing co-operation, the issue arises of the Library's general Collection Development Policy and, in particular, that of the African Studies Section – for these cannot be ignored. No library is an island – we must co-operate or cease to flourish. And SOAS Library, though a national collection for Asia and Africa, is no exception. Broadly, the Library seeks to acquire works of scholarship and source materials, wherever published, relating to the study of the countries of Africa and Asia in the field of the humanities and social sciences. It also aims to develop a representative selection of creative literature in their vernacular languages, in translation or relating to those regions. Such a wide remit inevitably means that gaps will be left or certain subjects or genres less emphasised than others, bearing in mind that the Library, while a national and international resource for Asian and African studies, exists principally to support the teaching. Learning and research activities of the School. There is, as ever, an informal network of colleagues and contacts at academic and research libraries around the country. We know of one another's collection strengths and weaknesses, major new acquisitions, areas of particular interest and so on. And we use this knowledge when advising visitors and enquirers. For example, both the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and the British Library of Political and Economic Studies at the London School of Economics (both part of the University of London) have a strong interest in ephemeral political material such as election literature (including posters, banners, badges &c.) and have acquired various sets from recent elections in southern Africa. The University of Durham Library has a strong interest in the Maghreb and Islamic Africa, but especially in the Sudan. Rhodes House, at the University of Oxford, is the home of the Oxford Colonial Records and the Oxford Development Records Projects, collecting personal and themed archives respectively relating to Africa. More recently Rhodes House received the huge archive of the (U.K.) Anti-Apartheid Movement before the AAM dissolved itself following the political changes in South Africa. SOAS is a constituent college of the University of London and, as such, has a number of co- operative arrangements within the University regarding specific subjects. For example, The Institute of Education collects material on primary and secondary education in Africa, including textbooks; SOAS Library therefore does not collect, but acquires material on tertiary education and on literacy/illiteracy. The School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine covers the more technical side of medicine in Africa; SOAS Library therefore concentrates on the social (e.g. of AIDS) and traditional aspects, and public health. University College has a very strong department of Egyptology; SOAS Library therefore ignores this in favour of subsequent historical eras. The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, a research institute not accessible by undergraduates, collects on Roman Dutch law (e.g. of southern Africa) and law in Anglophone Africa; SOAS library therefore seeks to cover the whole of Africa at the undergraduate level, and concentrate on primary (the laws themselves) rather than secondary material. SOAS has negotiated more formal partnerships with two local institutions – one at the School level with University College concerning courses and student access as well as library co- operation, and the other with the British Library at St. Pancras concerning co-operative collection development and reader access. In Africa, SOAS Library was involved in 1996/97 in a partnership project, under overall British Council and Overseas Development Agency (ODA) auspices, with the Institute of Ethiopian Studies Library at the University of Addis Ababa. This involved a short visit to Addis Ababa by a member of the SOAS Library staff to assess their holdings and advise on the creation of an on-line data-base, followed by a three-month placement at SOAS Library by a member of the Institute's staff. At the national level, there exists a network of libraries in Britain with an Africa interest – the Standing Conference on Library Materials on Africa (SCOLMA), founded in 1962. SCOLMA provides a forum for librarians and others concerned with the provision of materials for African studies in UK libraries. It monitors, co-ordinates and seeks to improve the acquisition of library materials on Africa, especially through its co-operative Area Specialisation Scheme for the acquisition of materials from Africa. SCOLMA also sponsors bibliographical projects, publishes bibliographical works and a journal, and organises conferences (some of them international) and seminars on African bibliographical topics. Under the SCOLMA Area Specialisation Scheme (which I revised and updated in 1997 during my term of office as Honorary Secretary) participating libraries specialise in the acquisition of materials from particular areas of Africa or particular subjects and act as information centres. SOAS Library, as the only academic library in the UK covering the whole of Africa in the humanities and social sciences, naturally has responsibility for acquiring material on and from a substantial number of countries. Moreover, as academic interests and financial security have changed over the years in universities around the country, SOAS Library has tended to step in and take over when other institutions have had to drop their SCOLMA responsibilities. For example, we took on responsibility for Zimbabwe from Southampton University Library when it was unable to maintain coverage; and for Nigeria from the Royal Commonwealth Society's Library when it was sold to Cambridge University as a closed collection. Slightly more unusual was SOAS Library's involvement with Madagascar, taking on responsibility for the island from the University of Kent in 1997. This occurred after SOAS Library had been the beneficiary of an important and unique collection on Madagascar from a retired missionary and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. James Hardyman. We were successful in obtaining external funding to catalogue the collection (from the British Library's Grants for Cataloguing and Preservation) and to bind and conserve it (from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)'s "Follett" Funding of Specialised Research Collections in the Humanities). As a result of the gift, which complements very well our existing holdings and our missionary archives, and its accessibility through our on-line catalogue and the on-line African Studies database, SOAS Library has become the European centre for Malagasy research (though sadly Malagasy studies are not yet taught here). This may be taken as an excellent example of a donation taking on almost a momentum of its own in terms of establishing a library as a centre of excellence. As a consequence of having the collection, we later purchased microfilm sets of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society Archives for Madagascar and the other southern African states; we have hosted several Malagasy events and we have a large and growing number of visitors researching Madagascar. The Archives and Special Collections at SOAS, reflecting mainly the non-official link between Britain and the countries of Africa and Asia, are of international significance. They include the archives of the various missionary societies, administrative and diplomatic papers, business papers and scholarly papers as well as notable collections of individuals, such as Sol Plaatje, or organizations, such as the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Many original typescripts of Heinemann's well-known African Writers Series are held at SOAS. Although the Library does not seek to purchase specific archives, relying as it does to a great extent on active fund-raising, major collections are offered to the Library from time to time and a stringent selection policy is in place. For example, the ODI is currently offering a substantial and important collection of grey literature from the mid-1990s, relating to the humanitarian aid project of the International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience. One of the School's academic staff served as a member of the project team, and that whole geographical area and subject mix (refugees, civil war, humanitarian aid &c.) is of great interest to researchers and students at the School. Yet space, staff and funding are at a premium; the offer will be put to the Archives Committee for a policy decision. Work in progress includes the on-line cataloguing of the London Missionary Society (now the Council for World Mission) archive and library. Projects for cataloguing missionary photographs and the Library's important collection of Swahili manuscripts are planned. Turning back to the African Studies Section of the Library, its most precious holding is the African Language Collection, including material both in and on African languages from all over the continent. This is unparalleled in Britain, indeed in Europe and even further afield, as most libraries collect in only one or a few African languages – of a particular group or region, or supporting what is taught at the parent institution. I am currently in the process of bidding for external funding from HEFCE's Research Libraries Support Project (RSLP) to catalogue on- line (including retrospective conversion of our manual catalogue records) and bring together into one classification sequence, all the various scattered parts of our African Language Collection. The application has passed the first round and is about to be considered in the second, and final round. As with previous rounds of funding opportunity, emphasis is strongly on access and co-operation among universities. Yet since there are no potential partners with whom to co-operate on this particular project, access alone to the Library's unique resource is deemed a sufficient qualification. Co-operation at the international level exists on a number of fronts. SOAS Library is a subscribing overseas member of the American Co-operative Africana Microform Project (CAMP), based at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago. CAMP is a co-operative association of academic and research libraries which promotes the preservation of rare or difficult-to-obtain publications, especially but not only newspapers and journals, and archives on and from Africa, and preserves them in microform. Member libraries can access these extensive microform collections via Telnet and borrow or even purchase, at cost price, material for their own students, thus avoid the high costs of acquiring, cataloguing and storing. Closer to home, the University of London's Centre of African Studies, based at SOAS, co- ordinates and promotes interdisciplinary study, research and discussion on Africa, and maintains a range of institutional liaisons with Africanist centres in Africa, the U.K., Europe, the Commonwealth and the USA. In Europe this includes the collaborative network, AEGIS (the Africa-Europe Group for Inter-disciplinary Studies). Through the Centre's AEGIS connections, SOAS Library has developed links particularly with the Centres of African Studies in Barcelona, Bordeaux and Leiden, mainly in terms of exchange of publications and of supporting visiting researchers. It may be that this is an area of co-operation which might be explored and more fully developed by librarians across Europe, for example, by organizing librarians' meetings alongside the regular AEGIS academic meetings to discuss a range of common problems or collaborative issues, from acquisitions to cataloguing to access. In view of all I have discussed in this paper, it must be clear that to my mind the biggest single change in recent years, and the one which has the most influence beyond its immediate technological sphere, is that of electronic publications in particular and IT in general. Quite apart from mainstream library systems such as INNOPAC, the impact of the Web has been phenomenal and will continue to be so as the technology further develops. This has huge implications for librarians and information specialists as we have both to learn new skills and update old ones, and adjust our approach and re-evaluate our world-view in a rapidly changing environment. And the key to this is through co-operation - locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. After all, we are ultimately a service profession; our goal is to support learning and advise on access to information wherever and in whatever form it is available. See David Anderson and Rosemary Seton, "Archives and manuscript collections relating to Africa held at SOAS", History in Africa, 22, pp.45-60