Africa at the Internet Archive: Annotated Bibliographies

I really enjoyed listening to Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive hosting Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld discussing their book about library digitization: Along Came Google. As a hard-core user of Google Books, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, and other digital libraries, I really enjoyed learning more about these projects and the people who made them possible. There will be a recording available, and if you are a fan of digital books (you are, right?), then I highly recommend subscribing to Chris Freeland's super-informative email newsletter which has all the news from Internet Archive (including links to recordings of events like these); you can subscribe here.

And in the spirit of libraries and librarians, the books I want to share today are two bibliographical reference works that have helped me a lot in searching for and finding children's books of African folktales.

The first one is Folklore from Africa to the United States: An Annotated Bibliography by Margaret Coughlan.

Coughlan's book was published in 1976 so that means it is getting close to 50 years old, but it does provide an incredibly valuable inventory that covers public domain books from before 1925, and it extends up to the great outpouring of books of African stories for children that began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s.

Even better, you can supplement that book with a more recent reference work, also available at Internet Archive: Africa in Literature for Children and Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography of English-Language Books by Meena Khorana, published in 1994.

The annotations from both Coughlan and Khorana are really useful, especially if you are pondering whether you are going to buy a used book that is not available online at the Internet Archive.

So, enjoy these books-about-books, just a click away at the Internet Archive, along with many of the books that they reference too!

Folklore from Africa to the United States:

An Annotated Bibliography

by Margaret Coughlan.

Africa in Literature

for Children and Young Adults:

An Annotated Bibliography

of English-Language Books

by Meena Khorana