The permanent removal of archives and collections robs Southern Africa of part of its cultural heritage and can demoralise local scholars. The author proposes principles and partnership strategies, including models of new digitisation projects, that can foster a more ethical approach and help maintain the content and context of collections. Many ethical issues confr ont librar ians, archivists, and scholars today. Dilemmas about access, censorship and information overkill increasingly are apparent in the digital era. However, we often ignore the connections between our work and the structural foundations of research (in the form of documentation, archives, and publications) and associated ethical questions. The steady decline in the structural foundations of scholarship in Africa is a powerful force contributing to such negative trends as the 'brain drain'. Elsewhere (Limb, 2002) I point to signs of what I term an emerging 'document drain,' or loss of documents from, and in, Africa. Here I focus on Southern Africa and ethical responsibilities towards the acquisition and car e of collections. I discuss how ethics relate to Southern African repositories and analyse emerging models that might help mitigate a range of problems in this field. The growing debate on issues surrounding the handling of, and access to, African documents is apparent in contributions to this issue of Innovation. Related to this are complex questions of heritage rights, including the removal of original archives from Africa, and severe problems of archival preservation associated with declining budgets, rigours of climate and dangers to archives of political conflict. A parallel debate is running in museums about human remains and cultural artefacts pilfered by collectors (Leyten, 1995; McBryde, 1985). Common to both debates are serious questions of ownership based on legal or histor ical claims to 'ownership of the past' evident in respective claims of collectors and indigenous peoples. Collectors argue that: 'rescuing' property at risk justifies foreign retention; removal is 'legal'; property has a wider human heritage va lue; and acquisition ensur es access. Arguments from countr ies of origin stress: r ights of peoples to cultural heritage; country of origin ownership; and the need to maintain scholarly integrity. Ethical disagreements may arise over how to value 'facts': 'legal' according to whom and under whose laws? (Warr en, 1999). How can we achieve a balance between such apparently contradictory demands as the need of international resear chers for open access and heritage, or between national sovereignty and freedom of authors to sell their private paper s on the market? What should we do when contradictions arise? Concerned librarians, ar chivists and scholars can, I argue, play a central role in developing and applying ethical guidelines and establishing equitable and effective arrangements to improve access to and preservation of collections without infringing heritage. In the digital age, there are tools to deploy towards solvi...
