Introduction

In a 1905 commercial chart of the world published by the London Geographical Institute, George Philip depicted the major global empires and trade routes. The Liverpool publisher highlighted the British Empire in a vivid red while setting out the French in light purple, the Portuguese in blue, and the German in orange. Philip’s depictions portrayed a world awash with conflicting colors, with countries connected via steamship and rail. In the early 20^th century, after all, European empires expanded far beyond continental borders, and local, European manufacturing involved globally traded resources, as did the morning cup of tea or coffee. Far from new, that state of global political, economic, and cultural entanglement had been the state of affairs reaching back to the 16^th century, and arguably earlier.

For librarians responsible for collecting on different aspects of European Studies, these global connections matter. In part, they matter because librarians responsible for collection development are supposed to provide access to primary sources—often in the form of digital collections—to make research on Europe possible. They matter as well because many scholars studying Europe are exploring how the very idea of “Europe” was shaped by these international exchanges. In short, to cover Europe and meet researchers’ needs, European Studies librarians need to consider global connections.

Those connections are particularly important as libraries across the United States and Europe try to diversify their collections. Academic institutions in those spaces have long taught European studies as a story of global expansion and the spread of an elevated, Western culture. Now, when looking at the expanse of European empires and participation in global trade, diversifying collections means examining European action, policy, and ideas from multiple perspectives, including non-European voices. This requires ensuring inclusive content—presenting, for example, the human abuses Europeans perpetuated for economic gain, the intentional attempts at ethnic cleansing and genocide, and institutionalized racism and other forms of systemic discrimination.

Collecting on these topics, however, can be controversial, precisely because it contradicts centuries of claims about Western superiority and high civilization. To make matters more complicated, as Anne Stoler lays out in her book chapter “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form” (Stoler, 2002, 83-102), many government, academic, and private repositories across the US and Europe were complicit in the structure of colonial control and abuse as well as in the active destruction of historical records those institutions deemed unworthy. In consequence, just as much as libraries and archives enable scholars to uncover hidden histories, they can also distort the past, contributing to the continued focus on elite, white, male perspectives while obscuring historical realities (for discussions thereof, see Harris 2002 or Iber 2013). In consequence, addressing those imbalances and promoting diverse and inclusive collections usually means reshaping institutional priorities and coverage. The process of using limited resources to reshape collection priorities, however, can invoke anger on multiple sides, including from users angered by the presence of materials on critical race theory and by those frustrated by the slow rate in which a library is diversifying its collections.

Trying to diversify a library’s collections thus requires a librarian to step carefully in order to collect responsibly and successfully. This chapter aims to provide European Studies librarians with a series of steps for doing just that. Using European colonization in Africa between the 1860s and 1960s as a case study, the first section discusses the need to choose a subject and understand it before considering digital primary source collections. In the second section, we look at both the retrospective and ongoing purchase of scholarship. For both, we emphasize the importance of having a general understanding of the history of the subject in order to make informed decisions, providing suggestions in parenthesis for books and articles whose authors discuss the specific points at length.

European Colonization of Africa in Historical Records

At the beginning of the 20^th century, academic institutions across the US heavily promoted and then required courses in “Western Civilization,” promoting the idea of “Western” superiority and connections. These courses saw the US government, universities, and professors providing content encouraging students to think about European connections with the US. To support these classes, the institutions’ libraries collected and provided scholarship on topics like the Age of Discovery, Western expansion, and Great Thinkers. They emphasized a great “Western” civilization that spread from Europe to North America along with a common identity (Weber 1998; Stearns 2003). Communities in places across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, in contrast, were presented as primitive others (Mudimbe 1988; Mengara 2001).

A century later, European Studies librarians participating in building more inclusive collections have to acquire material looking beyond the individual European states’ internal communities or their relationships with the US and Canada. These librarians need to collect on Europe’s relationships with the different communities in the “Global South” and—as Siba Grovogu (2011) discusses—challenge the narrative of European superiority. To do this requires addressing the manifold components of the narrative and demonstrating respect for individual communities across the globe. Because tackling this task at once is largely unfeasible, librarians can break the topic down into manageable pieces focused on specific topics or global connections. To choose, it can help to look at what the librarian’s institution focuses on in its collections and/or what classes are taught. For institutions with courses on Western or Global Civilizations, colonization in Africa during the 1860s to 1960s can be a good place to start, as it is a common focus in those classes.

Once a European Studies librarian selects a topic, it is essential to develop at least a rudimentary understanding of it. Because libraries and other repositories are complicit in institutional discrimination, it is a political act to collect on those topics. It is important not to go in blindly. Looking, for example, at a topic like European colonization in Africa during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, it is essential to understand what “colonization” means before exploring what kinds of resources are available to study the topic.

So what was or is colonization? Most scholars agree that, at its core, colonization is about domination and exploitation (Horvath 1972). With that understanding, many scholars then break historical colonial practices into two main forms: settler and resource. Settler colonialism involved sending people into other lands for conquest and permanent resettlement. This form of colonialism was about claiming territory; toward this end, European colonizers often sought to ethnically cleanse an area rather than integrate or assimilate with local communities (Wolfe 2006; Free 2018). Resource colonization, in contrast, involved invasion, with the intention of depressing the local populations and extracting local resources for European exploitation, export, and/or consumption. Portugal, for example, set up forts along parts of the West African coast to facilitate the brutal enslavement of peoples, and the Belgium Crown invaded the Congo and built work camps designed to extract rubber and other resources (Hochschild 1999; Harms 2019). In either form, colonization is about repression, theft, and human abuses.

The history of European colonization of Africa can loosely be divided into three periods: early-modern, direct colonization from the mid-19^th to the early-20^th century, and independence in the mid-20^th century.

In the early-modern period, the primary focus of European states and of merchants sailing along the coast of Africa was commerce and resource extraction. As scholars or librarians looking at government and institutional records as well as archeological evidence know, that early-modern period began in a limited capacity in the 15^th century, when the Portuguese, and later the British, French, and other imperial powers and merchant groups, sent ships down the coast of Africa to find and establish new trade routes into the Indian Ocean regions. As they went, the European powers built competing forts along the coast for restocking and resource extraction. Merchant ship and port records provide evidence from this time of the enslavement of approximately 12 million people, forcibly moved by British, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and other European ships to the Americas and other lands. Court records and memoirs, in turn, discuss the brutal conditions on the ships, and the journeys’ adverse effects on the enslaved individuals as well as on the sailors and other officials involved. These records illuminate the horrific inhumanity of this period of colonization, the collaboration of several African communities with European merchants, and the horror many Europeans felt in seeing slavery abroad—a horror that led to the creation of abolitionist efforts (Pagden 1995; Lovejoy 2011; Brown 2012).

The European colonization of African in the mid-19^th and early 20^th centuries involved a shift toward paternal colonization, with European states “rushing” to take direct control of the continent. To justify their efforts, several European governments and scholars sought to actively erase the history of the diverse, culturally rich groups across the African continent. They claimed the “white man’s burden” was a “civilizing” mission with an imperative to enlighten non-white populations. To make those claims appear reasonable, states and institutions intentionally destroyed and/or stole evidence of art, architecture, and literature evidencing the lie. Several European states also dismantled local education systems on the African continent, promising to bring in more advanced forms (Conklin 1997; Mengara 2001; Marshall 2019). Such promises, however, were rarely fulfilled, resulting in a decline in literacy under European administration.

Instead, European colonial states attempted to silence individuals across the African continent. They set up systems of forced labor, and drove millions of people from long-inhabited territories to make way for European groups to extract raw resources for factories at home. France, for example, imported rubber from the former French Republic of Congo to make finished goods for French consumption or to sell back to Congolese communities (El Kallab 2018; El Kallab and Terra 2018). Even countries without colonies, such as Switzerland, had companies source raw materials like cacao from slave plantations (Haenger 2016; Purtschert, Falk, and Lüthi 2016). Seemingly innocuous “European” cultural products were manufactured for European profits from these highly abusive colonial systems of production, then sold either in the metropole or back to places from which the raw products had been stolen. In response, local communities fought back using myriad methods of resistance, from economic struggle to armed revolt (Uchendu and Okonkwo 2021). European states and companies frequently responded with brutal repression, including the German states’ attempted genocide in response to the Herrero Revolt (Hull 2005).

European colonial behavior in Africa took on a different tone with the First World War, and more so after the Second. This stemmed in part from a rise in global discussions of self-determination and human rights. Particularly during World War II, the European states involved claimed to be fighting for “liberty” and “equality.” Yet soldiers populating the French army from places like Senegal were hardly granted the freedoms and equalities they were supposedly fighting for; the same is true today, for example, for soldiers from Nigeria who serve in the British army. Continuing the ongoing movements for freedom from European oppression, one country after another across Africa demanded and fought for independence. The devastation of the world wars in Europe, combined with a greater ease of communication, meant that many of the colonial atrocities of the past became unpalatable. As the European states involved found themselves unable to afford to retain their colonial states, and facing uprisings and demands for independence across the African continent, most negotiated independence agreements favorable to themselves. By 1970, most spaces across the African continent had achieved independence and joined international communities like the United Nations (Cooper 2002). These developments significantly changed almost every component of European culture and politics, contributing to shifting access to resources, demographic development, and cultural revolutions.

As evidenced, however, in the ongoing imbalance seen in the collections of most libraries and other repositories in Europe and North America, the legacy of colonial oppression did not end with the formal death of most European empires. Content in national and academic repositories from Russia to the US still presents an image of the African continent as an underdeveloped, “primitive” space while lauding the colonial sensibilities of elite, white men. Such records continue to justify or excuse abusive behaviors, presenting as fact an explicitly colonialist mindset. This imbalance means that scholars—particularly students—exploring European colonization often encounter state, institutional, and private repositories across Europe and the Americas with collections emphasizing European narratives about colonialism that are designed to support discrimination.

Acquiring and Accessing Historical Material (Primary Sources)

Most librarians will be unable to acquire sufficient historical material to balance their collections, and would hardly have a place to put the material even if they did. Fortunately, there are now dozens of large and small digital collections of relevant historical material that librarians can include in their institution’s catalogs and/or resource guides. The following list provides some discussion of the kinds of collections and records available to European Studies librarians and scholars. Suggestions begin with open access collections and internet collection, emphasizing accessibility regardless of budget. The recommendations are organized by types of materials. For those with larger budgets, a second section includes collections that sit behind pricey paywalls, organized by platform.

State Repositories

Over the past decades, most European governments have sought to increase accessibility of their physical holdings by providing partial digital access. Some have scanned and provided open access to millions of pages relating to state and merchant involvement in colonial efforts and abuses; these holdings include government papers, official laws and regulations, and state surveys. State repositories usually offer digital surrogates, providing researchers with a sense of the physicality of the material even as they work online. A challenge, however, is that because many of the governments providing this kind of material are doing so in bulk, e-collections often include limited metadata and are rarely full-text searchable. Some of the more extensive examples include:

• Nationaal Archief (Dutch National Archives)
• Gallica (digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BNF, French National Library)

With most European history involving significant overlap and cross-interests, the European Union sponsored the development of the Europeana platform to make member states’ cultural heritage cross-searchable. The content—drawn in via APIs from contributing institutions—focuses on art, but does include a significant number of books and other written documents.

To promote discovery, several state repositories curate small, thematic collections or provide descriptions in blogs or other social-media accounts. See for example the British National Archives’ Blog.

Scholarly Digital Humanities Projects

Several research institutions are working to provide access to material about the slave trade and colonization in the form of digital humanities projects. These collections are usually curated to emphasize value-added pieces in the form of searchable databases and interactive maps or timelines. Slave Voyages, for example, provides access to a large, searchable database of ships registers from ships carrying enslaved persons during the Middle Passage, along with visualizations and discussions of that data. Slavery Images offers an interactive map using Leaflet; users can see historical illustrations of different ports, plantations, and so on across Africa and the Americas. Other collections, including the African Activist Archive, focus on getting specific, targeted collections up and accessible rather than drawing content on specific topics from multiple archives.

Preservation Projects

Several repositories have been working to digitize their material for preservation purposes. While some provide their own interfaces, others collaborate with one or more institutions. These projects often provide just barebones interfaces and metadata, focusing instead on creating digital surrogates of material in danger of deterioration. One notable example is the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), in which researchers can find collections of photographs and local government records from the early and mid-20^th century. Because these resources often include material from within the communities, they are particularly useful for researching European involvement in African and Caribbean history in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Printed Books and Serials in the Public Domain

Several large, collaborative projects have been designed to provide expansive access to material that is predominantly in the public domain. Focused on typed material, these collections usually allow full-text searching of government publications, autobiographical material, magazines, and journals. HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg, for example, are each based primarily on member contributions of printed materials in the public domain, including memoirs by individuals such as Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, and Mary Seacole. Project Gutenberg is the smallest, with emphasis on printed books. HathiTrust and the Internet Archive are both larger, with additions of journals, more books, pamphlets, and other materials. Note that each collection includes significantly more than “just” colonial material, making discovery difficult. Each is, however, particularly useful for the quality of its transcription and OCR use, making fantastic for accessibility considerations. Within Project Gutenberg, researchers can find full-text, human-generated transcriptions, making this collection absolutely reliable for screen readers, and HathiTrust and the Internet Archive have high standards for scan quality and OCR. The scale of accessibility means these collections are often worth including, despite their scoping challenges.

Archeological Reports and Surveys

Scholars and staff working on archeological projects often provide images and data about spaces and places for which there are limited textual records in either online interfaces or their own publications. Some archeologists go as far as to contribute to centralized repositories for sharing their work or make 3D tours of archeological sites available through platforms such as Google Arts & Culture and Sketchfab. These collections provide some material—if limited—illustrating the kind of spaces in which people lived.

Different state and international organizations also provide some access to cultural heritage materials. UNESCO’s World Heritage website, for example, can be a good avenue for finding some of these materials both in their own web presence as well as through associations such as the ZAMANI project.

Supranational Institutional Records

Organizations like the League of Nations, United Nations (UN), European Union, Council of Europe, and African Union provide partial access to their records online:

• UN Digital Library
• UN Official Document System (ODS)
• Council of Europe’s Electronic Documents and Archives
• African Union Common Repository
• European Union Official Documents

Readers should note that the UN’s online collections include material from the League of Nations about their mandate system, as well as international discussions of decolonization and post-colonial state formation.

Online access in each of these collections tends to focus on law and regulation, including full assembly minutes, rather than group or country reports. There is more contemporary material than there is material from the 1950s or 1960s, but most of these organizations are working to improve back access. These primarily 20^th-century records provide some reports from former colonies as well as extensive documentation from the colonizing states.

Purchasing Access (subscription resources)

Depending on your access to funding, you may also be able to purchase perpetual access or subscribe to material offered by vendors like AM (formerly Adam Matthew), EBSCO, Gale, or ProQuest, among others. While often expensive, these collections frequently provide access to material otherwise inaccessible to most researchers. Many also provide higher-quality OCR or HCR (handwritten character recognition) and metadata than many open access collections. They do, however, skew heavily toward British and US involvement in the world, though most include some content from other European states. These providers are currently looking to collaborate with different repositories across Africa in order to make more of their material accessible.

AM (formerly Adam Matthew)

AM scans and provides open access to primarily European, Canadian, and US materials on topics such as:

• Age of Exploration
• Empire Online
• Global Commodities

Each collection provides full-text facsimiles of hundreds of books and other textual documents such as newspapers, images, and maps, as well as other ephemera. Most provide some form of value-added content in the form of expanded metadata, interactive timelines, or maps, and provide some excellent datasets on the trade of materials such as cotton and coal.

British Archives Online

British Archives Online offers a number of collections documenting British colonialism, the British Empire, and British missionary work. Examples include collections in these thematic series:

• Governing Africa, 1808-1995
• India Under Colonial Rule, 1752-1933
• Running the West Indies, 1678-1950

Gale

Gale’s Primary Sources and Archives Unbound include some incredibly useful collections for researching British and to a lesser extent United States engagement with the world, which means their collections extensively document Anglophone colonialism. Collections of particular interest include:

• Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection
• Eighteenth Century Collections Online
• Nineteenth Century Collections Online
• British Library Newspapers (parts I to V, 1800-1950)
• The Making of Modern Law
• Archives Unbound: African Studies

These collections provide access to newspapers, pamphlets, and newsbooks illustrating British and other (mostly European) views of Africa, including bills on the sale of human individuals, shipping records, colonial government documentation, and more. Gale’s Archives Unbound: African Studies takes some steps away from British material, offering documentation showcasing German, Italian, British, and Portuguese colonialism and US “nation building,” with particular emphasis on the early 20^th century.

HeinOnline

HeinOnline focuses on legal content in the form of laws, regulations, and law reviews. This is a professional database, designed for those in various legal professions in the Anglophone world. As such, the platform provides access to some of the most comprehensive collections of full-text searchable British, Canadian, and US materials regarding law and the discussion thereof from the 13^th century to the present. In addition, and because of overlap, HeinOnline also provides access to collections stretching beyond the Anglophone world, including:

• Foreign & International Law Resources Database
• Law Journal Library
• World Constitutions Illustrated

The Law Journal Library supplements the UN’s collections with a search interface for engaging official League of Nations and UN journals, as well as extensive international commentary on those bodies’ rules and regulations. HeinOnline’s interface provides access to cross-searchable international treatises as well as world constitutions, with official English-language translations of different states’ constitutional development, fundamental laws, and international agreements.

ProQuest

ProQuest’s Primary Sources include access to extensive digital collections that emphasize US and some British history, with particular focus from the 16^th century to the present. Among other critical collections for the European Studies librarian looking at colonization, ProQuest offers:

• Early English Books Online
• Early European Books
• Caribbean Literature (Alexander Street)
• Colonial State Papers

These collections are particularly excellent for literature and published government reports. Furthermore, at the writing of this chapter, ProQuest is moving many of its collections onto the same platform, making their disparate, primary source collections increasingly cross-searchable.

Finding Additional Titles and Further Considerations

To find additional titles, there are several bibliographies and indices that the European Studies specialist should be aware of, including Africabib.org and the International Africa Institute’s list of African Digital Research Repositories. Because content on these platforms is expanding as providers digitize more material, consider scheduling periodic checks of these sites into your calendar.

Essential Considerations for Collecting and Discovery

While allowing scholars to examine European colonial history in Africa, each of these collections still presents highly biased accounts; librarians collecting materials, and the researchers studying those materials, should cast a critical eye on what they find. This raises the question of whether and how a European Studies librarian should raise awareness of these challenges. Should librarians include warnings in library guides, noting biased perspectives? Should they mention the issue in library instruction? Or does the responsibility fall on professors? Answers will differ between institutions, based on faculty needs and focus.

Tools and Resources for Approaching Scholarship on Controversial Topics

Approaching retrospective purchasing on colonialism and diaspora is challenging in part because of the colonial past and associated silences. Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, for example, while an indictment of colonial atrocities, notoriously gave voice solely to white, European characters (Conrad 1903). Along with the majority of his contemporaries, Conrad depicted the Congolese people as silent, needing whites to act on them or on their behalf. Without access to publishing, and often actively silenced, people from across the African continent had limited recourse for rebuttal (White et al. 2001). As publishing options started opening up in the latter half of the 20^th century, individuals such as Chinua Achebe—author of the 1958 novel Things Fall Apart—responded to works like Heart of Darkness by arguing that while people might have been forcibly silenced, those silences speak (Singh 2011). For the librarian, the materials missing are frequently just as important as what is present, with the silences telling an important story. Most scholars and students, however, are trained to consider only what is included in textual historical records, not what is missing.

The reach of those colonial systems is still visible in who gets to publish, how children are taught to understand spaces like Europe and the US, and how libraries are organized. Addressing colonization is thus not only about collecting materials to present a diversity of perspectives, but about making these materials discoverable. This section recommends approaches to scholarship on topics like European colonization in Africa, focusing on diversity and inclusion. It considers both retrospective and ongoing purchasing for books and journals, then briefly looks at some considerations for discovery.

To approach collection development on controversial topics such as European colonization in Africa, you’ll want to consider material types such as books and journals as well as digital collections of scholarship, historical texts, and other ephemera. Among the questions you should ask:

• Are you developing a sub-collection from scratch, filling in holes, or seeking to broaden your collection moving forward?
• What size budget do you have?
• What kind of material are you looking for (e.g., journals, books)?
• How are library users going to find the material you acquire?

This section will take you through those questions, focusing on considerations for informed and intentional collecting and suggesting approaches to collection development. Part of the challenge is to consider scope: what should be the limits of European versus African Studies? Because the two are inextricably entangled, this chapter recommends that the European Studies librarian collaborate directly with African or other area subject specialists.

Particularly if an institution does not employ an African Studies specialist, European Studies librarians should consider turning to the multiple library organizations which often hold discussions on topics like these, including:

• European Studies Section (ESS) of the Association of College & Research Libraries
• Center for Research Libraries’ (CRL) Cooperative Africana Materials Project (CAMP)
• Africana Librarians Council

These organizations provide spaces for discussions, updates on material access, and other forms of ongoing support.

Retrospective Purchasing

To build a collection of scholarship from scratch or to fill in holes, you’ll need to consider the historical publishing landscape. Bluntly, no matter how much you might wish to provide diverse perspectives in the collection, most of what is available about almost any aspect of European history will be from white, elite perspectives. You’ll find only limited material illustrating African perspectives prior to the 1960s decolonial movements and, arguably, for decades after. Walter Rodney was able to publish How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972 in London with Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, but it was one of a limited number of such publications (Rodney 1972; Davis and Johnson 2015). After independence, printing houses did not simply appear en masse throughout Africa, although a handful were available primarily to white scholars. Some authors were able to send their work to Europe or North America for printing, but shipping handwritten or typed manuscripts was hardly reliable or available to all. You can and should address this imbalance by drawing on voices from the multiple Black diasporas across the Americas and Europe. The diversity within the Black diaspora means, however, that while incorporating these studies makes a collection more inclusive, they do not replace or stand in for African scholarship on European colonization in Africa. In consequence, while emphasis on diversity is possible, it is nigh impossible to actually balance a library collection.

To rapidly acquire a decent range of material from both African and Black diaspora voices and to highlight these texts, librarians can look toward topical vendor packages. Several vendors now provide subscription resources for acquiring material on Africa and/or the African Diaspora, including ProQuest’s Black Studies Center and Sabinet. Databases like the Black Studies Center provide curated selections of material that emphasize studies on Africa generally, along with colonization and different Black diasporas, and the digitized content allows access to material that has long been out of print. Readers should note, however, that collections like the Black Studies Center focus on communities in regions like the US or the Caribbean, and should be considered in concert with American or African Studies librarians. There are relatively few vendor packages that explicitly focus on the scholarship by people of color in Europe. Keep in mind the range of European imperialism, such as the fact that most of the Caribbean islands were under European control until after the Second World War.

For retrospective purchasing, title-level monograph selection is another option. This practice requires more consideration and effort, but is often necessary to fill holes or to work with limited budgets. Unless your institution has a significant amount of money to spend, you’ll likely want to focus on the past 20 years of scholarship. To direct your focus, consider prize lists of curated lists of scholarship such as professional bibliographies. For example, the Oxford Bibliographies (subscription resource), especially those for African Studies and Atlantic History, include multiple sections on European colonial rule, such as “Colonialism and Postcolonialism” (Ordinas 2021). For particularly limited budgets, you can turn to yearly awards such as the African Studies Association‘s (ASA) book prize, although many of the texts may fall under the African Studies librarian’s purview. These curated lists and prizes offer recommended reading for exceptional or important scholarship.

Journals as Backfiles and Ongoing Scholarship

To consider relevant scholarship published in journals, the European Studies librarian should again consider working with an African Studies librarian. While many libraries will already have some relevant coverage in the form of vendor packages focused on Black and/or African Studies, you will also want to do title-level selection for journals. To target your focus, consider looking at the “African Studies Journals, Magazines and Newsletters” section in Brill’s African Studies Companion Online (subscription resource), which includes titles focused on colonialism or diasporas, such as:

• Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
• Settler Colonial Studies
• Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies
• African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal
• Journal of Black Studies

Also consider how journals with broader geographic and/or subject focus speak to topics like colonization. Journals such as Contemporary History or Central European History increasingly acknowledge colonial history as part of history rather than a separate field. Explore the chapters in the first section of this Handbook for title recommendations on British, French, or German studies, many of which are including articles acknowledging the role of colonization in the histories of their countries, and consider titles such as:

• African Studies
• The Journal of African History
• Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria

These titles provide studies on European colonization and are more likely than European Studies journals to publish scholarship from outside the “West.” As such, they can provide access to African and other views of European colonization.

Keeping Current with Recent Monographs

There are multiple sources for recent and forthcoming monographs and book series, with a focus on publishers, book series, title selection, or vendor recommendations. To start, consider looking toward books from across the African continent. Fortunately, it is no longer necessary—though it’s often still useful—to send buyers. Instead, you can use services like the African Books Collective or Clarke’s Bookshop in Cape Town to acquire material from multiple African presses. Their catalogs include university presses and research center publications from presses such as Wits University Press in South Africa (part of University of the Witswatersrand) and the University of Nairobi Press. Some US vendors, including GOBI, also have working relationships with several of these collectives. These books are often only available in print, which can make space a concern. Nonetheless, these volumes are essential additions to European Studies collections, providing a diversity of voices on topics like European colonization.

The European Studies librarian can also draw on the European and US publishers with which they are likely already familiar. Over the past 20 years, most large publishers have started publishing on Africa and Black diasporas, and often make sure to include Black and African voices. Look at university presses such as Cambridge, Ohio, and Oxford, and consider other academic presses such as Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield), Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge (an imprint of Taylor & Francis), Hurst & Company, Bloomsbury, and I B Tauris. Most publishers are happy to provide catalogs or book alerts, and often make their catalogs available online.

Increasingly, academic and popular publishing houses across the US and Europe also offer book series focused on African studies that explicitly seek to provide a diversity of voices. Ohio University Press, for example, has been an essential publisher for African histories since the 1960s. To make acquisition easier, Ohio recently organized new material into the series Africa in World History and New African Histories. Cambridge University Press started an African Studies series in 1968, while Brill recently began a series on African History. Duke University Press also has a focus on African American, African, and Black Diaspora Studies. Those series can be included in approval plans or standing orders as well as checked in publisher catalogs.

To select titles, some libraries or other repositories work with vendors like GOBI, which offer slips based on metadata such as publisher, subject, or Library of Congress (LOC) call numbers. Of particular note, GOBI and other vendors offer a “Black studies” tag as a searchable subject. This tag is associated with any book tagged by GOBI’s metadata specialists work as being about any Black diaspora communities or Africa in any subject. As with any human-created metadata, however, the tag is unevenly applied, so it cannot be considered comprehensive.

Similar issues occur in searches based on Library of Congress Classification (LCC) codes. While most European history falls under DA to DR, African history technically falls under DT. Material on African colonization and diasporic communities with connections to Africa can, however, fall under any of these or even other call numbers.

Promoting Researcher Access through Discovery

The significant limitations of metadata and its unequal implementation mean that discovery will necessarily be an issue. Most research libraries lean into LCC organization, which often leads to the separation of material on European colonization away from European history and into African history. Catalog automation further means it is difficult to overwrite or add the metadata necessary for searching.

While purchasing electronic copies of journals and monographs can overcome some of that limitation by allowing full-text searching, not all scholarship is available electronically. Furthermore, platform divisions often mean it is necessary to search multiple databases. Several publishers take advantage of JSTOR as a centralizing repository. Others, including Cambridge University Press and Brill, have their own platforms for electronic use, which can limit accessibility. And many publishers only offer print monographs for institutional purchase.

To overcome those challenges with discovery, European Studies librarians need to consider the impact of library instruction and communication with faculty. Libraries can and should consider using research guides to make suggestions, with included statements regarding the problems of access and historical silences. Yet librarians cannot expect users to find or read those guides. To promote change and increase the likelihood of discovery, consider frank discussions with faculty and, in library instruction and consultations, include explicit commentary on the issues.

The intellectual underpinnings of colonial oppression are in the hands of librarians: dictionaries, encyclopedias, artifacts, policy proposals, and—most crucially—research. Fortunately, recent anti-colonial discourses and practices have pushed the responsibility of librarians to create inclusive and de-colonial collections to the forefront of the profession. Recognizing the suppression of non-white perspectives and acknowledging bias in early and contemporary acquisitions practices can help drive this movement forward.

Conclusion

Attempting to address their participation in the institutionalization of systemic discrimination, many repositories are currently trying to reform their practices and collections to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive (Andrews 2018). To achieve those aims, librarians have to actively and intentionally commit to ensuring that the topics they cover include different perspectives. That means critically analyzing what material a library holds and exploring what the institution needs to support research from multiple perspectives.

Because there was hardly an aspect of European everyday life, society, or politics that was not entangled with Africa, regardless of ethnic, religious, or socio-economic identity, a librarian collecting in European Studies must make sure to look at Europe’s relationship with Africa. Over the past two decades, multiple libraries, archives, and other repositories have argued that we must strive to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Collecting African studies as part of European Studies is essential in striving to lessen the horrors and legacies of colonialism. It is unlikely that most librarians and archivists will achieve any sort of equitable representation in our lifetimes, but explicit and thoughtful efforts in that regard are essential.

To move intention into action, this chapter recommends breaking down controversial areas into approachable areas and addressing them one at a time. To do this effectively, you need to understand your chosen topic and examine the challenges to addressing unequal coverage. Next, and before making choices within your library’s budget, consider what scholarship your library already holds, the materials you need to acquire to provide a diversity of perspectives, and the breadth of available material.

If librarians are going to emphasize equitable access to diverse and inclusive collections, they must consider what this means for both their holdings and presentation, and take steps to realize these claims. The scope of this goal can seem insurmountable when considering the attendant challenges of defining diversity or inclusivity, and of approaching those concepts from every angle. Focusing on institutional emphasis, and ensuring that single repositories collections cover a broad range of perspectives, can be a controversial act. Most institutions across the US and Canada were part of the problem, and, unless DEI efforts start at the top, librarians will often receive pushback or challenges for trying to redefine their coverage. But if librarians want their commitments to mean anything, it is still important to try.

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