African Newspaper Union List: low‐tech resource/high‐tech access

Describes the development of the African Newspaper Union List by the Africana Librarians Council of the African Studies Association, in conjunction with the Center for Research Libraries. The process involved selecting a project which was attractive to funding agencies, effectively addressed a real problem of Africana libraries, and would not overburden already busy staff at the participating libraries. The difficulties that had to be overcome included the challenge of developing a high‐tech project for librarians whose main experience with technology was limited to its use in library service, not its design and implementation. Other challenges were the nature of the problems of acquiring publications from Africa, and the small pool of participating librarians who were widely scattered geographically, each in quite different institutional settings.