Korea, Bordeaux and Tanzania: Librarians in African Studies meet in Basel

The 11th meeting of European Librarians in African Studies was held in Basel on 28 June 2017, the day before the 7th European Conference on African Studies started. The ELIAS meeting was organised by Susanne Hubler-Baier of Basler Afrika Bibliographien, together with colleagues from Basel University Library.

European information specialists were not the only ones present at ELIAS: Dr Yongyoon Park from the Korea-Africa Centre in Seoul gave a presentation about this new and practical Korean think-thank, and the new African Studies Librarian from Michigan State University, Jessica Achberger, was a lively attendant of ELIAS.

David Tréfàs and Alice Spinnler from UB Basel kicked off with a presentation about searching through several information silos at the same time, in the Basel Afrikaportal  that is currently under construction and looks to be an interesting showcase.

Reto Ulrich spoke about one of the specialities of Basler Afrika Bibliographien, the Namibia Digital Collection. Jos Damen and Ursula Oberst of ASC Leiden gave presentations on metrics and altmetrics, that compared the research output and (usage of) collections of several African Studies centres in Europe and Africa.

Mattias Åkesson from the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, made clear how a societal task (work for unemployed people) could be combined with digitizing 40 boxes of materials from the African liberation movement, in cooperation with the Tanzania Heritage Archives. Megali Meunier from LAM Bordeaux told about the new building of the Library of Les Afriques dans le Monde, with well over 55,000 books in open stacks in new reading rooms.

After lunch, the interesting exhibition Stolen Moments – Namibian Music History Untold at Basel Afrika Bibliographien was visited: a nice combination of new art, old recordings and untold musical histories from Africa. The day was concluded with a dinner at the Ethiopian restaurant at the Markthalle in Basel –with plenty of histories to talk about.

All presentations can be found on the website of ELIAS. 

Jos Damen