Africana Studies Subject Guide

Untitled (det.), M.O. Bushara, 2008, © October Gallery

Africana Studies Research Guide For help with your research, visit the reference desk (hours) on the second floor of Barnard Library, or contact a Barnard reference librarian:        Phone: 212-854-3953        Chat: IM BarnardReference        E-mail: refdesk@barnard.edu Request a one-on-one consultation with a Barnard librarian if you have an in-depth research need.

Reference Resources | Country Overviews | CLIO | Databases | Barnard and Columbia | Other Libraries & Interlibrary Loan | RefWorks & EndNote

REFERENCE RESOURCES (books and databases)
Useful for:

• an overview of a topic
• background and factual information
• bibliographies

Country Overviews

• CountryWatch: Up-to-date news, data, background briefings, and analysis on every country of the world.
• Country Profiles: From the Library of Congress.
• EIU.com: Economic Intelligence Unit publications including Country Reports, Country Monitor, Country Commerce and Country Finance publications for 115 countries.
• Europa World Plus: Online version of the Europa World Year Book and the nine-volume Europa Regional Surveys of the World series.
• World Fact Book: From the CIA

CLIO
CLIO (Columbia Libraries Information Online) is the on-line catalog for the Barnard and Columbia Libraries. CLIO can be searched by author, title, subject, keyword. etc. 

• The holdings of the Health Sciences Library as well as Union Theological Seminary are included in CLIO
• The Law Library's catalog is Pegasus, Teacher's College catalog is Educat and JTS' catalog is Aleph
• To search CLIO, Pegasus and Educat simultaneously click on the "Search all CU catalogs" tab on the opening CLIO screen

Sample Searches:
*Title search: type in as much of the title as you know, e.g.,
encyclopedia of african american
journal of african american history

*Author search:  last name,  first name, e.g.,
achebe, chinua

Finding a book about a person or a subject: start with a Keyword search using the most distinctive words associated with the topic. Then look for useful ubject headings and do a Subject search.

*Keyword search: use: "  " for a phrase,  ? for truncation (to find variant endings of a word), e.g.,
ngo nigeria
infanticide literature africa?
"human rights" nigeria
gentrification and ("south africa" or johannesburg or harlem)

*Subject search: use Library of Congress (LC) subject headings, e.g.,
uganda -- history
urban renewal -- africa
isegawa moses
infanticide in literature
women nigeria

Limiting to books in Barnard Library : use the Pre-set Limits or Post Limits option

Note that although the Barnard Library is in Lehman Hall, CLIO location Lehman means the Social Sciences library at Columbia; Barnard books have the location Barnard.
 

DATABASES/INDEXES: For Finding Journal and Newspaper Articles
The following indexes and databases are recommended for researching Africana Studies topics:

Academic Search Premier Access UN: United Nations website Africa review of books. Africa-wide: NiPAD: Index to publications and unpublished manuscripts about and from Africa in history, literature, music, arts, business and social sciences, 1981 to present. African E-Journals Project African Women's Bibliographic Database: English language database containing over 27,000 citations from 1986 to current.

Search across these three databases by entering words in the box below: Africa-Wide NiPAD Ethnic NewsWatch Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience Essays Search:

AllAfrica.com Aluka. Struggles for freedom in Southern Africa Black Studies Center: Includes scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspapers, articles and more. From the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, International Index to Black Periodicals and the Chicago Defender. Caribbean Abstracts CIAO: Columbia International Affairs Online Ethnic NewsWatch: Full text, 1960 onwards. Historical Black Newspapers JSTOR: Full text articles from more than 350 scholarly journals in anthropology, African studies, education, history, philosophy, political science, population studies, sociology and others from each journal's first issue but excluding the most current, usually 3-5 years. Lexis-Nexis Academic: Domestic, e.g. New York Times, as well as many foreign newspapers/resources in full-text including the Times, London, BBC Monitoring Middle East. MLA Bibliography: Literature, language, linguistics and folklore. Citations for articles, dissertations, books, book chapters, etc. from 1963 to the present.  PAIS: Public Affairs Information Services Project Muse: Full text articles from  scholarly journals published by Johns Hopkins University Press in the humanities and social sciences. Included are Africa Today, Human Rights Quarterly and many more titles ProQuest Direct: Online journal articles and citations, Interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) Slavery & anti-slavery: a transnational archive

BARNARD AND COLUMBIA RESEARCH GUIDES AND SELECTED WEBSITES

• African-American Studies Subject Guide (CU)
• African Studies Resources (CU)
• African Diaspora and African Literatures Subject Guide (CU)
• Africana Studies program (Barnard College)
• Center for Human Rights Documentation & Research
• Institute for Research in African-American Studies (CU)
• Atlantic Slave Trade & Life in the Americas: a Visual Record U. of Va. et al
• Voyages: Transatlantic Slave Trade Emory University

OTHER LIBRARIES & INTERLIBRARY LOAN

• CATNYP - the online catalog of the NYPL research library and LEO is the online catalog of the NYPL Branch Libraries.
  The holdings of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as well as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts are included in the main catalog, Catnyp.
• Interlibrary Loan & Borrow Direct - accessible by clicking on
  "Request It."
• WorldCat - the online collective catalog of OCLC members around the world. Helpful for identifying and locating items not at CUL.
• CRL, the Center for Research Libraries  - a consortium of North American universities, colleges and independent research libraries.

REFWORKS AND ENDNOTE
For managing your citations.

Return to Subject Guides

kdobrusky@barnard.edu/hwinston@barnard.edu 8/24/2009