Search guide

You will find all of our material in AfricaLit in the form of books, journals, articles, report series, official publications, films, music, maps, and more.

You can choose to do a simple search (‘Quick’), an advanced search (‘Extended’), or a search using various fields (‘Multi-field’). You can also browse through an alphabetical list (‘Browse’).

Always use English subject words when searching in AfricaLit. These cover countries or regions (’Geographical keyword’) and subjects (’Keyword’), which are dealt with in books or other material. 

Under the detailed entry in AfricaLit you will come across other subject words, which may also be relevant to your field of interest.

The link collection A Guide to Africa on the Internet is our compilation of links to websites containing freely accessible, Africa-related material.

These links are directed towards research and are divided up according to geographical (’Sorted by region/country’) and subject-related (’Sorted by subject’) sources. Under the countries you will find links to official websites, concise facts, statistics, and to journals in that particular country.

All printed journals and indexed articles in our library can be found either through direct links on our website on our website or by going straight to our library catalogue, AfricaLit.

You will find our electronic journals via our website. In these you can search for articles, many of which are supplied in full text, i.e., the whole article is given.

Internet versions of daily newspapers and the like can be found under the respective country in A Guide to Africa on the Internet. These often have an archive of articles, which can be searched.

A number of databases for information searching exist, which focus on a variety of subjects.

Apart from our library catalogue and electronic journals, there is also a selection of databases, accessible via our website. Included here are reference databases, which provide references to documents, and full text databases, which supply documents’ texts in their entirety.

Many organisations, both national and international, have publications and country reports on their websites, for example Human Rights Watch, http://www.hrw.org, and Sida, http://www.sida.se/.

You can also find information with the help of Internet search services. A Google search, http://www.google.com, or the equivalent thereof often produces a vast, mixed range of hits

Scirus, http://www.scirus.com, or Google Scholar, http://www.scholar.google.com, provide information, which is somewhat more research orientated.

In Google News, http://www.news.google.com, it is possible to search for articles and news items from various news services.

For finding statistics, you can use words such as 'table', 'graphs', 'numbers', etc. If you are interested in opinions, information pages and manifestoes, you can also use search words such as 'statements, 'white paper', 'report', etc.

The catalogues of other libraries may contain literature on Africa, which is not available at the Nordic Africa Institute’s library. Use LIBRIS (The National Library Systems of Sweden), http://libris.kb.se/, to find books, journals, and more.

Other library catalogues, both within the Nordic regions and further afield, are listed on the library’s web pages.

Studying Africa is a book compiled and published by the Nordic Africa Institute. It is a guide to literature and information searching, which also contains introductions to subject literature. In this publication you will find information on how to set about finding further information on African sources.

If the above information does not give the desired results, you are welcome to contact us at any time with your questions. You can reach us through Ask the library, our electronic query box, or you can phone or write/send an email.