Hartwig and O'Barr state in The Student Africanist's Handbook that Students of African affairs are poorly served by standard indexing services in the respective disciplines. Too many periodicals devoted to Africa are simply not indexed in the standard reference works.This paper is the result of a study carried out in late summer 1976, to determine how well that statement stands. My approach was to go directly to the indexes (in the social sciences and humanities) to learn how many Africanist journals are actually indexed, and how well Africana materials are covered.For this study “index” is interpreted in its broadest sense: any bibliographic list arranged in some order to allow a subject approach. Therefore, abstracts and bibliographies were included, as well as current contents and advanced contents indexes, in addition to the more “traditional” indexes, but machine-readable data banks were excluded. Also, I sought indexes that are current and that appear on a regular basis, at least annually. 1975 volumes (or the most recent) were used for comparison.

This is a list of published guides to the archives of Africa, especially those in microform and including inventories, records, catalogs, lists both finding-and special-, indexes, annual reports (and for South Africa, also archivalia and trials), arranged by regions, primary international language, and countries, excluding only Egypt, with titles in English, French, and Portuguese, but not those solely in Arabic. No titles were found for Spanish-speaking Africa. Collections of Africana on microfilm are identified as they provide better access to original materials not otherwise available. In addition, considerable time and funds have been spent by non-profit organizations such as the Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP) in identifying archives and manuscripts to be filmed, targeting the funds to film them, and then having the microfilm available to scholars worldwide. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) online catalog which contains CAMP's nearly 10,000 titles is a major source for African archival materials. Ancillary materials are histories or historically-related materials such as pamphlets that together provide an important source for the writing of history. These appear as a small selection of materials in book format at the end of each geographic area, where they exist. Much of this guide is based on the holdings of the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was developed from the two libraries' respective in-house lists. Other U.S. research libraries have been added for location of additional titles and copies. Citations in this guide derive from searches in the RLIN database (now well over 100,000,000 titles), which includes holdings

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