LibGuides: African Studies at the MSU Libraries: Digital and Multimedia Collections

Digital Reference Sources for African History

African Digital Research Repositories
A list of known repositories within the African continent, compiled by the International African Institute
African Studies Virtual Library
Columbia University's collection of African Studies Internet Resources is an on-going compilation of electronic bibliographic resources and research materials on Africa available on the global Internet, created under the purview of the African Studies Department of Columbia University Libraries.

Vincent Voice Library

Vincent Voice Library
The G. Robert Vincent Voice Library is a collection of over 100,000 hours of spoken word recordings, dating back to 1888. A number of recordings have Africa related content, including speeches, oral histories, the African Studies Center Interview series, and more.

Africa Past and Present Podcast

African Past and Present Podcast
Africa Past and Present is a podcast about history, culture, and politics in Africa and the diaspora. The show highlights interesting and significant people, ideas, and discussions in African Studies from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. A product of MSU's Matrix.

Digital and Multimedia Center

Gerald M Kline Digital and Multimedia Center
The Gerald M Kline Digital and Multimedia Center, including the Vincent Voice Library, offers both online and traditional media collections, designed to meet research needs across many different disciplines and subject areas. The DMC also serves both the MSU community and the worldwide academic community through digitization projects that preserve scholarly resources.

Finding Videos

MSU Libraries has a number of DVDs (and some earlier formats) about and/or from Africa. Films and television programs can be found by searching the catalog and specifying the Digital and Multimedia Center as the "Location" and/or "Video/Visual" as the material type. Lists of Nollywood and Bongo films will be coming soon on our Many Books (Movies), Many Languages series! Stay tuned!

Streaming Video

MSU Libraries has a number of new streaming video options, many of which have growing collections of African related and originated content. To find out more information on streaming video, see the LibGuide.

Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window
Cross-searchable portal for streaming video collections from Alexander Street Press.
Ethnographic Video Online This link opens in a new window
Alexander Street Anthropology brings together a wide range of streaming video, written ethnographies, field notes, seminal texts, memoirs, and contemporary studies, covering human behavior the world over. Essential for study in the areas of politics, economics, history, psychology, environmental studies, religion, area studies, linguistics, and geography, the database will contain more than 1,800 documentary films and over 100,000 pages of full-text material at completion, including tens of thousands of pages of previously unpublished material from major archives.
Kanopy Films This link opens in a new window
Watch over 30,000 Documentaries, Classic and Indie Films.
Swank Digital Campus This link opens in a new window
Use "Student" login link if not registered with a Swank instructor account.
Swank licenses and distributes feature film content to non-theatrical markets including U.S. colleges and universities. 1,000 contemporary and classic movies are available to MSU-affiliated viewers for non-commercial educational and personal streaming video access. Sub-title captioning is available on most films. Titles can be searched, and films are grouped in 17 categories for browsing.

MSU Libraries

Research Guides