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Ethical Dilemmas Facing Africanist Librarians, Archivists & Scholars Today

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Peter Limb
Peter Limb*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
*
limb@msu.edu
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Extract

The connections between our work as librarians, archivists or scholars of Africa and the structural foundations of research (in the form of archives, documentation, and publications) we often take for granted. This paper focuses on our ethical responsibilities towards acquisition of Africana, but the principles proposed as ethical guidelines are applicable to other kinds of research, such as fieldwork. I first discuss ethical questions in general and then address how ethics relates to African studies and Africana librarianship. I discuss related problems such as what I term the African “document drain.” In a forthcoming ARD article (Limb 2002c), I elaborate upon these themes with particular emphasis on how emerging new models of partnerships, together with new electronic tools, might help mitigate such problems.

Type
Articles
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 89 , 2002 , pp. 3 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © African Research & Documentation 2002

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the University of Michigan Africa Workshop, February 2002.

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