Library & Archive

The Institute of African Studies has two functional research libraries, namely the Main Library and the Archival Research Library.
These Research Libraries basically support research and learning about Africa by offering extensive resources that highlight the continent's varied histories and current developments. It holds documents, bibliographies, books, rare oral and written publications, and the assembling of sources for African studies. Moreover, it offers researchers access to a wide array of books, journals, archival materials, and datasets focused on African history, politics, culture, languages, and development. This helps scholars and policymakers conduct high-quality, evidence-based research.
Periodically, the Library engages in the collection, preservation, and dissemination of both rare and contemporary materials, encompassing indigenous knowledge systems and archival documentation. This effort aims at ensuring the protection of Africa's intellectual and cultural heritage for the benefit of current and future generations.
By offering comprehensive and targeted information services on African lifestyles, the Library is strengthened by its collection of colonial documents, government reports, and oral fieldwork resources. It benefits from extensive research support provided by academic staff and librarians, which fosters interdisciplinary inquiry, promotes scholarly excellence, and enhances teaching and learning both within the Institute and throughout the broader academic community of the University of Nigeria. Through its library services, the Institute is enhancing both global and local partnerships, broadening equitable access to knowledge, and promoting evidence-based research that informs policy and promotes understanding of Africa in a focused and strategic way. Besides the historical materials, the Library has a collection of current publications on political events, conflicts, governance, and social change across Africa, which offers opportunity for housing relevant policy and development documents for the present and future.
In specific, the Archival Research Library consists of non-recent documents such as daily newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines like Daily Times, The Nigerian Observers, Morning Post, Nigerian Statesman, Daily News, The Renaissance, Daily Sketch, Daily Star, New Nigerian, Satellite, African Development, Time Magazine, The Guardian, Time International, Daily Punch, Vanguard, and Daily Champion. In addition to the newspapers, there are edited books such as the African Indigenous Laws of 1975, Sub-national and Federal Government Annual Reports, a series of Ahịajọkụ lectures, and several 1982/3 Igbo Salvage Ethnographic tapes. These archival materials date back from the 1960s to the 2000s, and they remain valuable to researchers looking into all aspects of Igbo life.
Recently, the Institute acquired archival materials from Dr Nancy Neaher Maas as a donation. These documents were firsthand notes of Dr Maas’s doctoral dissertation, which she collected during her fieldwork in the 1970s in Awka in Igboland, and they are available at the Institute Library for postgraduate students and other scholars who are interested in furthering their research in the Bronze (Copper Alloys) "Lower Niger", South West Niger, and Mid Benue, or to those doing comparative analyses.