Materials relating to sport in Africa in the collection of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University: an overview

From its inception, the goal of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University has been to collect as comprehensively as possible materials from and related to Africa, regardless of subject. As a result, the Herskovits Library has acquired materials related to sport from its beginning. Formally established as a separate library in 1954, the Herskovits Library traces its origins to the arrival of Melville J. Herskovits at Northwestern University, who was the first anthropologist appointed to the faculty in 1927. Herskovits initially arrived at the university with a research focus on the study of black culture in the western hemisphere, although this quickly changed following two research trips to the interior of Suriname in 1928 and 1929. He conducted research in West Africa for the first time in 1933, and from that time on, his research agenda was increasingly Africa-related. From the day he arrived on the Northwestern campus, his commitment to library development was integral to his overall commitment to developing research and curricular programs at Northwestern. Clearly, sport-related research in the broadest anthropological context was a topic of early encounter for him at Northwestern. The earliest use of the collections for research in this area can be documented in the very first thesis, a Master's thesis, supervised by Herskovits following his appointment to the Northwestern University faculty-Primitive Games in Africa by Chester Lee Bower (1929). Herskovits established the Program of African Studies at Northwestern in 1948 with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, and convinced the Northwestern University administration to create a separate library of African studies committed to comprehensive acquisitions in perpetuity. Herskovits found support for the library's comprehensive retrospective collection building program for African Studies in the form of a $1,250,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. Today the Herskovits Library is comprised of over 400,000 volumes, 2,800 current serials including 250 current newspapers, 16,000 books in 300 African languages, extensive collections of ephemera, maps, posters, videos and DVDs, photographs, archives, manuscripts, rare books and artefacts in all formats. The Herskovits Library serves a constituency that includes both the Northwestern University community and African studies scholars regardless of affiliation world-wide. In the Chicago region, Herskovits Library staffregularly work with a broad range of individuals referred from local public and school libraries, as well as researchers from local business, legal, and philanthropic organisations, and with primary and secondary teachers in efforts to improve Africa-related curriculum. Library staffparticipate annually in the Chicago Public Schools' continuing education course, "Teaching about Africa." Estimating sport-related holdings is difficult given the manner in which Africana materials are cataloged at Northwestern, which uses the Dewey Decimal system. In the circulating collections, including both monographs and serials, there are approximately 1,600 volumes falling within the Dewey decimal 790s range of 'sport.' The library has general surveys of African sport, textbooks, and histories of sport based on specific African countries such as Algeria, Madagascar, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda. These geographical surveys that focus on the history and practice of sport in a given country are followed by volumes that focus on specific sports - rugby, football (soccer), cricket, track and field, and then the other more solitary pursuits such as golf, hiking, bicycling, martial arts, swimming, and fishing. Of course, the figure of 1,600 volumes does not include the many publications that have a sport-related focus that have been classified within the various social science and humanities disciplines, or literature and children's books that feature sport. …