Links to African Journals and Online Digital Libraries

Online information about African journals has increased dramatically during the past several years. Here are annotated links to resources about African journals and other periodials.

A second set of links describe online digital libraries that contain other types of scholarly information about Africa.

African Journals

Tables of Contents, Indices, and Abstracts

African Journals Online (AJOL): Tables of Contents and abstracts (when available) for over 230 journals from 21 African countries, including Francophone journals. Full text of articles can be ordered (gratis to certain users in selected countries through International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).) Managed by National Inquiry Services Centre (NISC) in South Africa.
ASA Online: Abstracts of articles from approximately 230 African journals in the social sciences and humanities and other edited works, indexed by subject and country. Offers free e-mail subscription to quarterly update in PDF format. Full text of some articles can be ordered. Compiled by the African Studies Center Leiden.
Quarterly Index of African Periodical Literature: Index of articles from more than 300 periodicals published in 29 African countries; most are scholarly journals. Index can be searched by keyword across all periodicals or within a particular periodical and browsed by topic, journal, geographic area, author, and other categories. Catalogued by the Library of Congress Office, Nairobi, Kenya, beginning in 1991.
H-Africa Listserv: Subscribers to H-Africa have entered Tables of Contents (TOCs) of more than 850 issues of African journals. TOCs can be searched from the listserv homepage Search Discussion Logs box (at top left of page) for "TOC" and any words from title of journal or articles. Older TOCs are sorted by journal on the H-Africa African Studies Journals webpage. H-Africa is a discussion list of H-Net.

Full Text of Journal Articles

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): DOAJ provides links to journals with peer review or other quality control that provide free access of all content on the Internet. More than 2100 journals are included in the directory, which is searchable by broad topic, keyword, and title. The directory is not specific to Africa, but more than 25 journals about Africa are included. By University of Lund, Sweden.
Index of Full Text Electronic Resources: List of journals for which full text of articles is available via library subscription to electronic publications, as well as on journal websites online. A search for "Africa" lists journals with "Africa" or "African" in the journal title or name of publisher. Search shows which subscription services include full text of articles, by year. Licensing requirements generally restrict access to library patrons. List provided by Michigan State University Libraries.

Directory of Africa Periodicals

Africa South of the Sahara: African Journals: Annotated links to African magazines, journals, and newsletters on the Internet. By Karen Fung for the Information and Communication Technology Group (ICTG), African Studies Association, USA.

African Online Digital Libraries

Africa Online Digital Library - West African Digital Resources: Provides multimedia, multilingual resources about West Africa to public and scholarly audiences. Includes serveral photo galleries and research on representing Pulaar digitally. By MATRIX: Center for Human Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online and the MSU African Studies Center.
Diversity and Tolerance in the Islam of West Africa: Making available online previously unavailable oral, photographic, video, and archival materials about Muslim practices in Senegal and Ghana. The first collection is about religious pluralism in St. Louis, Senegal. By MATRIX and researchers at MSU and six other universities.
South African Freedom Struggles, 1950-1995: Provides public access to 40 digitized periodicals from a crucial period of struggle in South Africa. This is the first collection of Digital Imagine South Africa (DISA), a collaboration among research libraries and archives in Southern Africa funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
South African History Online: A growing collection of South African biographies, chronolies, educational resources, and special projects.
Aluka: A project of key libraries, museums, and archives to build a sustainable digital library of curated collections from and about the developing world, focusing, to begin with, on Africa. This is an "incubated project" of Ithika, which seeks to use information technologies for the benefit of higher education around the world.

Directories to Digital Libraries about Africa

World History Sources: Africa: A directory of more than 20 online primary source archives about Africa, with thorough reviews. Includes archives of historical documents and images. By the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.
Projects funded by Program for Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA): Directory to projects about Africa (including the African e-Journals Project) and other parts of the world funded by TICFIA, the U.S. Department of Education program that funded the African e-Journals Project. Listing provided by the Center for Research Libraries.