Reference Guide to Africa: A Bibliography of Sources (review)

Al Kagan's Reference Guide to Africa, an excellent handbook for students, scholars, and librarians, provides a platform for discussing important issues related to how research on Africa is conducted today. Every library should have this book on its reference shelves. If it has the first edition, the substantial updating since 1998 and major developments in libraries and information technology make it a worthwhile purchase. Librarians should use it to evaluate and guide collection development. Teachers should recommend it to students for beginning their assignments. It should be available in departmental reading rooms. Classes and seminars on research methodology and bibliography should make it required reading, as many do.

A Reference Guide to Africa is a gem. The chapters are logical and well chosen, covering the social sciences and humanities plus agriculture, development, and the environment. The works cited represent the best resources, and each section points the reader to broader research, with recommended periodicals and library catalog subject headings. But there are many voices—including librarians and academics in the chorus—that declare print bibliographies defunct, replaced by online indexes and databases. Is a guide like this necessary anymore? Let me lead the response with a firm yes, and tell you why.

The typical student approaches a research-paper assignment by sitting down at a computer. If the library and the faculty have taught information-competency skills and the student has absorbed them, she will diversify her strategy wisely, conducting searches in the library's catalog and licensed databases, and on Google and its ilk. Her search strategy is limited by how much she already knows and the number of appropriate terms she can muster as keywords. If the words chosen match the words used by the author in the title and abstract or the librarian and indexer in subject headings and descriptors, the search will result in usable material. Most of the time, this works well enough, and students are little motivated to engage in the more tedious process of paging through a bibliography or reference work, taking notes, and then searching for the items cited. Many students are impatient even with indexes that do not link directly to full text online.

The rich resources described in A Reference Guide to Africa demonstrate that "well enough" isn't really good enough if the goal is for the student to be aware of all the available material. This book grew out of "Bibliography of Africa," a graduate course at the University of Illinois developed and initially taught by noted Africana bibliographer Yvette Scheven, whose work has been ably carried on by Al Kagan since 1993. Few formal courses in library-research techniques are taught, but most libraries offer instruction in research methodology and the use of library resources.

More than thirty years ago, when I entered library school, I was astounded to discover how much easier my previous graduate work in anthropology and African studies would have been if I had known of the reference tools available. I had done all of my research papers depending on serendipity: dabbling a bit in the card catalog, browsing the stacks, scanning bound volumes of journals likely to carry relevant articles, tracking down references in the notes and bibliographies of the works I consulted. In my introductory reference course, I became acquainted with the array of indexes and bibliographies that would have sharpened my searching. And these were all in print; electronic indexes were just appearing on the horizon.

A student once came into our library complaining that he had just spent an hour looking on the internet for the population of Dar es Salaam. It took thirty seconds to find the data in a reference book—one of several in the collection that contained population statistics. The computer's speed in searching the digital universe does not always result in finding the information sought. When a student enters a library, even a relatively small one, she has at her disposal millions of sources of information and...