For the past three years the media of the Western World have been full of news about the great famine in Africa. The horrific pictures of the starving in Ethiopia or Mali have resulted in large sums of money being collected from the pockets of the well-fed rich of the first world for redistribution to the starving poor of the third. Bob Geldof’s Live Aid Concert was not only the most spectacular concert of any kind ever sponsored: it was the most successful one-off fund-raising event ever staged. So much money was raised that Geldof and his colleagues responsible for administering it could not spend it all immediately on supplies for famine relief and began to consider using some of the funds at their disposal for long-term developmental and research projects that would help avert future famines of the kind which still, alas, continue to plague some parts of the African continent.

The online searching of databases to retrieve bibliographical information is increasingly becoming common research practice in a wide range of disciplines. For the scholar of African studies there is as yet no single comprehensive database covering the literature from the continent on a multi-disciplinary basis; however there are a number of existing databases which serve as a useful and up-to-date bibliographical tool. The aim of this paper is briefly to outline those currently available databases which are of relevance to African studies and to offer some suggestions as to how this valuable service may best be utilised.

Online information retrieval services first became readily available to the public in the early 1970s, chiefly in the area of science and technology.

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.

The government cuts of the early 1980s have dealt harshly with Oriental and African area and language studies in Britain’s univerisites. Between 1981 and 1985 London University's School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), the major world institution in these fields, lost 37% of its budget and 25% of its teaching staff - those from its Department of Africa’s language teaching establishment dropped from thirty to nine. The continent of Africa boasts more than 1,000 languages: SOAS can now offer teaching in only nine. In other universities staff losses in African studies number some fifty posts of which only fourteen have been replaced. African studies in general have been reduced from inter-disciplinary programmes of area studies to a subordinate status within subject disciplines.