I am going to talk quite specifically and exclusively about York’s proposed inhouse Southern African Studies Information Database, its history so far, how we hope to set it up and how it might be used. I suppose it could be regarded as an object lesson in the creation of an economically viable regionally orientated multidisciplinary bibliographical database! In best library tradition, although it is only so far a proposed system, it is already known by its acronym SASID and that is how I shall refer to it throughout this talk.

Although there is obviously a number of existing databases which do serve African research there is a minimal number which have specifically African coverage and certainly none which directly meets our needs in Southern African Studies, especially as most databases are subject rather than country/region orientated.