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Summer 2004
Vol. 23, Num. 4

Africa Studies

Message from CRL President Bernard Reilly
Recent Developments in African Scholarly e-Resources
Political Communications Web Archive - Preserving Nigerian Election Sites
Disseminating African Scholarship: A Report on the DATAD Workshop
New Africana Acquisitions
Program and Services Update
Cooperative Africana Microform Project: Forty Years of Collaboration and Scholarship
Inside Apartheid: The Benjamin Pogrund Collection of Southern Africa Materials
The Carter-Karis and Karis-Gerhart Collections of South African Political Materials, 1882-1990

Program and Services Update

Loyola Marymount University

Loyola Marymount University became the Center’s newest Associate member on April 1, 2004. LMU elected to join the Center as the Los Angeles-based university expands its PhD programs, recognizing that the critical resources available through the Center would well support LMU faculty and student research.

“With one window on dynamic Los Angeles and another on the Pacific Ocean,” Founded in 1911, Loyola Marymount is one of 28 Jesuit universities in the United States. It has more than 80 degree tracks and courses of study and sets rigorous standards for graduate and undergraduate education.

LMU is home to two libraries--the Von der Ahe Library on the Westchester Campus and the William M. Rains Law Library--as well as a number of centers dedicated to both research and service. Construction of a new library complex “to promote a culture of academic excellence” is the centerpiece of the university’s new strategic plan.

Although a newcomer, LMU has moved quickly to exploit the benefits of its membership:

  • LMU sent a representative, Glenn Johnson-Grau to the Center for an orientation and tour of the collections. Johnson-Grau is LMU’s Reference Librarian for Networked Resources.
  • Johnson-Grau also attended the Annual Meeting of Voting Members, and the print archive forum held as part of the Annual Meeting program.
  • LMU created a CRL-dedicated Web page that enables students and faculty to learn about Center membership, borrowing policies, and practices. The Web page also includes direct links to Center topic guides, the Catalog Search system, and cites a wide variety of Center collections.

The Global Resources Network

In June 2004 the family of scholarly resource development initiatives based at the Center grew to include two Global Resources projects --the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP) and the German Resources Project (GRP).

Global Resources was originally developed as a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of American Universities (AAU), under funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its general goal was to “expand access to international resources not currently available to North American students and scholars.” The two organizations recently decided to make this effort an ongoing one, creating the Global Resources Network (GRN). GRN will achieve its general goal through discrete projects that focus on significantly expanding the depth, breadth, quantity, range of formats, and variety of international information resources available to students and scholars, and making dispersed collections more complementary through coordinated acquisitions that are combined with powerful systems for access, discovery, presentation, and delivery.

Under a newly established partnership between ARL and the Center the Center has assumed administrative responsibility for the two projects. For several years now the Center has similarly served as a base for two other Global Resources projects: AFRINUL, the African Newspaper Union List, and the Digital South Asia Library.

Although the addition of the new projects will contribute to the growing community of scholarly enterprises administered at the Center, the missions and activities of the Center, German Resources and LAARP will remain the same.