African Studies Research Collection

The African Studies Research Collection is located in the Herman B Wells Library on the Indiana University, Bloomington campus. The collection ranks among the top tier of such collections in the United States. It includes materials produced about Africa and in Africa in all media, and it supports the presesnt and future undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral studies and research needs of Indiana University students and faculty.

The collection comprises approximately 130,000 volumes of monographs, over 700 serial subscriptions, audiovisual materials, as well as electronic resources. IU's African Studies Program offers a wide spectrum of courses and research in the humanities and social sciences, with special emphasis on history, linguistics, anthropology, folkore, and the arts. Particular emphasis is on research related to three thematic areas: 1) expressive culture; 2) political economy; 3) trans-nationalism. The library collections reflect this range of interests with emphasis on in-depth collections in such disciplines as history, anthropology, archaeology, folklore, ethnomusicology, the fine arts, literature, film, communication, culture, linguistics, economics, political science and government, ecology and conservation, as well as religious studies, with a special emphasis on materials relating to Islamic cultures.

Materials in the African Studies Collection are in major European as well as as African languages. Dictionaries and grammars are included for as many African languages as possible. Other literary and scholarly texts are collected in-depth for national languages or widely used languages in Sub-Saharan Africa, and/or languages that are used in research at IU: Afrikaans, Bambara/Bamana, Chichewa/Nyanja, Chitumbuka, Fula/Pulaar/Fulfulde, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Kpelle, Lingala, Ndebele, Sanga, Shona, Somali, Sotho, Kiswahili, Tswana, Twi/Akan, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba, and Zulu.

Selected Highlights

Digital Somali Library
One of the top three Somali collections in the world, our collection includes items which are not held anywhere else. To improvie access to these unique resrouces, we are currently developing a Digital Somali Library which will include finding aids as well as full-text versions of books in the collections.

Nuer Field Notes Project
This is an online publication which provides access to digitized, not previously published linguistic field notes of the Nuer languages (donated by former missionary to South Sudan, Eleanor Vandevort), slides, letters, and contextual essays.

President Banda Archive
This collection consists of the papers of Dr. Hastings Kamauzu Banda, former Life President of Malawi, and those of his official biographer, Dr. Donald Brody, dating mostly from the 1950s to the 1990s. It includes correspondence, speeches, manuscripts, diaries, and extensive background information about Southern and Central Africa, including Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, both published and unpublished.

Video Collection
Check out our steadily growing collection of African videos and DVDs (feature films and documentaries). The collection currently comprises more than 400 videos/DVDs.

Current News
The African Studies Collection's Website offers links to the latest news about Africa from such news services as CNN (Africa), New York Times (Africa), BBC (Africa Service), et al. Addtionally, there are links to African newspapers online from more than 30 African countries as well as current newsfeeds for breaking African news.

Contact Information
For further information or assistance using the collection, please contact the subject librarian for African Studies:
Marion Frank-Wilson
Herman B Wells Library, E660
Indiana University
1320 E. 10th Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
812-855-1481
mfrankwi@indiana.edu

top