The Association of African Universities (AAU) are working with the HBCU Library Alliance, UbuntuNet Alliance, and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) toward the development of a future grant program called Hidden Collections Africa.

Hidden Collections Africa will be a program that promotes ready access to African cultural and scientific heritage so that the contributions of African people and nations to global research and development become widely understood. The program will digitally preserve collections while promoting history and scholarship, helping to advance the expansion of knowledge spaces for Africa. Grant recipients will describe and digitize currently inaccessible or at-risk rare and unique materials held by knowledge organizations in Africa.

To help inform the development of Hidden Collections Africa, AAU and its partners have designed a survey to solicit information that will help the program’s developers and its potential funders better understand needs and priorities related to the stewardship of rare and unique collections among potential applicant organizations in Eastern and Southern Africa. Survey responses will help AAU and its partners gauge the interest in and readiness for a pilot regranting competition focused on making rare and unique collections widely accessible.

If you represent a collecting organization such as a library, archive, museum, or historical society in Eastern or Southern Africa and would like to participate in the survey, write to hcafrica@clir.org.

The survey will remain open through Tuesday, July 4, 2023.

No information shared through this survey or in subsequent communications during this exploratory phase will have any bearing on a respondent’s future participation in Hidden Collections Africa as an applicant for funding. You may choose to participate anonymously or to provide contact information to receive information about the survey’s results.