AFRICANA LIBRARIANS COUNCIL

Bibliography Committee Meeting
Thursday, November 16, 2006
The Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco

Minutes

Angel Batiste, LC; Ruby Bell-Gam, UCLA (Chair); Lettie Bennett, ProQuest; Phyllis Bischof UC-Berkeley, Emerita; Simon Bockie, UC-Berkeley; Fehl Cannon, LC; Joe Caruso, Columbia; Miriam Conteh-Morgan, Ohio State; Andrew DeHeer, New York Public Library; David Easterbrook, Northwestern; Greg Finnegan, Harvard; Karen Fung, Stanford; Miki Goral, UCLA; Marieta Harper, LC; David Henige, Wisconsin; Pamela Howard-Reguindin, LC-Nairobi; Bassey Irele, Harvard; Al Kagan, Illinois; Esmerelda Kale, Northwestern; Deborah LaFond, Albany; Joe Lauer, MSU; Bob Lesh, Northwestern; Peter Limb, MSU; Ken Lohrentz, Kansas; Pierre Malan, SABINET; Loyd Mbabu, Ohio; Bill Olsen, Georgetown; Lauris Olson, Penn; Laverne Page, LC; Loumona Petroff, BU; Elizabeth Remak-Honnef, UC Santa Cruz; Jason Schultz, Georgia State; James Simon, CRL; Gretchen Walsh, BU; David Westley, BU; Dorothy Woodson, Yale.

Preliminary Business. Visitors were introduced, the agenda reviewed, and the minutes of the Spring 2006 meeting (Boston) were approved.

Conover-Porter Update. Walsh read the short list of candidates: Teferra, Damtew and Philip G. Altbach, editors. African Higher Education: An International Reference Book. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Miescher, Giorgio and Dag Henrichsen. African Posters: A Catalogue of the Poster Collection in the Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2004. Gerdes, Paulus and Ahmed Djebbar. Mathematics in African History and Cultures. An Annotated Bibliography. Cape Town: African Mathematical Union, 2004. The winner will be announced at the Awards Ceremony following the Presidential Address on Friday, November 17, 2006, with Olson presenting the award. [Note: Lauris later gave an excellent short speech at the awards ceremony, ably tying ALC’s work to the strategic plan of ASA.] Bell-Gam will send out press releases as soon as Limb sends her the mailing list of announcement recipients.

Guest Presentations.
Lettie Bennett, ProQuest. ProQuest plans to provide access to the African Writers Series product at low or no cost to African libraries, although no details were provided. Of the 359 titles in the original Heinemann series, they will include 300. Problems with obtaining rights prevent inclusion of the rest. Chinua Achebe has agreed to include his titles. Mbabu commented that the series contains very popular writers, and that faculty at Ohio University are pleased. The AWS is patterned on Literature Online, and allows enriched searching by fields such as genre and gender. A trial can be requested from the publisher’s representative or the website.

The Schomburg collection is the nucleus of Proquest’s Black Studies product. Bennett described it as having “something for everybody”, i.e., from faculty to undergraduates. Brochures for both ProQuest products were provided.

Bell-Gam noted that ProQuest had addressed suggestions that its advertising should make clear that the AWS is limited to works in the Heinemann series, and does not represent the totality of African literature. She also praised ProQuest for its responsiveness to ALC feedback and concerns, noting that the University of California was considering purchasing AWS for the UC consortium. Limb reported that MSU has also purchased the product, after initial misgivings about the cost per title when the project was first announced. He expressed an additional concern that since the text was rekeyed to maximize searching capability, users have lost the original appearance of the text, and the resulting document is more difficult to read. Attaching a PDF of the original text would offer more options, while retaining the benefits of ful-text searching. Bennett reported that thumbnails of the covers are attached.

Caruso asked what titles remain to be added to the array. Bennett said the reps could make the list available. [Bell-Gam forwarded the AWS list to the ALC list on Nov. 26, 2006] Olson commented that the vendor’s user statistics indicated that no one seemed to use the product at Penn. Mbabu noted that students at Ohio preferred the online version to print copies in the collection, at least for research assignments. Howard-Reguindin asked what African libraries have taken advantage of the low cost program. Bennett will send figures. Easterbrook noted that the demonstrations at the recent Cape Town Book Fair were well attended. Kagan suggested that since Internet access is limited for many African libraries, inclusion in Widernet would be a good move. Easterbrook commented that access issues had been discussed in Cape Town. Phyllis Bischof suggested that information about these issues be put in the Africana Libraries Newsletter (ALN). Kagan noted that a discount for consortia such as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) should be considered.

Pierre Malan, SABINET Online. Malan provided some history. SABINET started 35 years ago as the South African Bibliographic Network, with a union list of serials and electronic access to government gazettes. They have started up an e-journals hosting project. It’s a small operation at present. They also follow up on parliamentary legislation. They got feedback from academic organizations, and identified 300+ journals. They started with 50 journals online, based on a print subscription model, which is good for publishers. They feature accredited journals approved by the South African Ministry of Education. SABINET now has 228 journals online, with 10,300 articles per year. 98 institutions have subscribed, most in South Africa, some in the US and the rest of Africa.

Usage is growing because the product is unique. Downloaded articles cost about $1.25. For the future, they will be going to a new platform, which will include Open Access as an option for publishers. Both open access and subscription journals can live on the same platform. SABINET only provides the vehicle; they don’t take rights from the publisher. They are working with Google to develop harvesting of journals so that Google users can purchase articles found from SABINET. They are also working on archiving articles.
Kagan noted that while SABINET is adding new titles yearly, SABINET does not inform subscribers of the additions. Malan commented that some libraries subscribe to sub-sets, which may not get all the titles added annually. Bell-Gam commented that SABINET now offers the option of subscribing to individual titles, which some libraries prefer to entire subject sets. Limb reported that MSU subscribes. He likes the access, although there are gaps and back issues have problems. Liaison with JSTOR could be fruitful. SABINET is interested in archives, but it’s not a high priority at the moment.
SABINET includes a few titles from outside South Africa, including Ghana and Nigeria. The future might bring regional projects, or SABINET might become a mega-project. They are looking at other regions. Bell-Gam asked about publishers’ costs with open access. Publishers pay no fees, but get subscription fees less 20% for SABINET operations. They used to have a relationship with AJOL, but it ended about three years ago. SABINET: http://www.journals.co.za

Scholarly Communication on Africa: Opportunities in the Digital Era. Report on an international conference (Conteh-Morgan)
The conference was held at University of Leiden, co-sponsored by CODESRIA. There were 25 scheduled papers, with 23 actually presented: 14 papers by Africans, some in Europe on other programs; 3 by Africans in the US; 1 paper from Canada; 1 from India; and 4 from Europe. Attendees were mostly librarians, editors, and publishers. Some papers are available online at the Leiden website. (http://www.ascleiden.nl) One paper interviewed African journal editors about open source. Results indicated they had no clear understanding of what open source is – most opted to continue as they had been. A few papers were on institutional repositories, making the case for forming them. University of Leiden has an institutional repository for a consortium of African studies scholars called “Connecting Africa.” Another paper looked at content management for consortial undertakings, but concluded it was not easy and had many problems. Many of the projects discussed required a shift of thinking and business models. The focus was less on how do we build an institutional repository, but what do we put in it?

Garry Rosenberg Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press, South Africa (http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za) talked about applying the access principle to the electronic age, and building an African knowledge commons. Access principle = “commitment to scholarship carries the obligation of broad dissemination” and authors believe that “obscurity is a greater threat than piracy.” A change in attitude is needed to encourage this principle. HSRC materials are included in bundled initiatives such as E-Granary. HSRC produces CD copies of papers for distribution.

Joed Elich of Brill is working with copublishing in certain countries to make books more affordable. The pricing models vary according to the country. Not many local publishers are exhibiting at the Cape Town book fair – a move is on to ask European publishers to sponsor African publishers to attend.

In ISI’s citation indexes, 23 out of 8000 journals were African, indicating poor visibility of African journals in global scholarship. One speaker described two types of science journals: CORE (international) and NICHE (regional / local) which tend to publish studies of local relevance. Most African scholars have published in niche journals. Conteh-Morgan’s own paper was on literature – the only one, looking at literature web sites, “Weaving Other Anansi Webs: Developing the Literary Map of Africa.” The next conference will be in Senegal.

Finnegan noted that he had an article just out in a book that originated in the AAMES panel at the 2004 American Library Association (ALA) annual meeting in Orlando, with his contribution and others added afterwards: “The Impact of Information Technology on Africana Scholarship and Library Collections in the United States,” in R.N. Sharma, ed., Impact of Technology on Asian, African, and Middle Eastern Library Collections and Services (Scarecrow, 2006). Limb noted that Garry Rosenberg (HSRC) is at ASA – could he be invited to the vendors’ panel on Friday. Olson would follow up.

Bell-Gam noted that we need reports on future conferences, and asked for more information to be sent out on the database that Conteh-Morgan is developing with an ALA grant. She is looking at the body of African writers in the diaspora, and emerging writers. It was originally focused on US undergraduate students, but this conference indicated broader use and interest.

Bibliographies and Other Reference Tools
Howard-Reguindin, LC-Nairobi reported on the Quarterly Index of African Periodical Literature, which added 1650 citations this year. LC has underwritten all expenses for the past 15 years, and she is making a plea for ALC members to take on some of the indexing. Since the index uses ProCite, the work could be done anywhere. The need is greatest for French journals. Any of the titles on the current LC subscription list could be done in a pilot project. Limb suggested using online tables of contents where possible to minimize keying. All copies of the index to gender issues compiled by Ruth Thomas have been promised to requestors. She is trying to get some more to supply all requestors. The Laws of Kenya will be available online ($1400) and in CD ROM ($1200). She will send out more information. LC Nairobi has updated its web site. They are doing more cataloging of LC receipts.

Proliferation of web sites. Limb led the discussion. Many parallel sites have been developed, essentially attempting in various ways to index the Internet, but many links are down. It is difficult to get feedback. Would more subject-specific sites, such as Conteh-Morgan’s literature site, be of greater use? Might an interactive, cooperative model be a good approach? Simon commented on similar discussion on the Germanists list about Google customized searches where one selects particular sites, e.g., open access journals, so the results are tailored to a particular topic. Caruso emphasized that a cooperative model needs cooperative labor. There is a need for specialized guides. Walsh noted that institutions do guides that are course-specific and can’t just send students to mega-sites, even though they have some advantages. Bell-Gam reminded the group that mega-sites are a lot of work.

Kamusi Project. Bell-Gam led the discussion on the online Swahili dictionary project at Yale. This had started with grant money, which forbids charging for future use, even after the grant had run out and further development requires some funding. However, most institutions cannot “contribute” – they need an invoice for charges. Use of Title VI funds for this project was suggested. Mbabu suggested partnerships with institutions for contributions in kind (services, etc.) to keep it going. We will continue discussion. Send ideas to Bell-Gam by the end of November.

Africa-Wide NiPAD.
Bell-Gam opened the discussion, which had been suggested by Lohrentz. Many institutions have subscribed, and have observed problems. Bell-Gam will send comments to the producer NISC. Lohrentz asked for copies of any teaching or user guides that colleagues have developed.

 

Submitted by Gretchen Walsh

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