About the Collections Hub

The African Poetry Collections Hub will identify and locate hidden African Poetry manuscripts, materials, artifacts and collections, and hopefully result in the virtual reunification of dispersed collections. 

  • Hidden Collections: collections that have not been adequately described, only accessible through a collection title. Under processed.
  • Virtual Reunification: a consolidated, digitized representation of scattered manuscripts, artifacts, documents and poetic works. A strategy for reassembling physically dispersed collections.

Without this attention, research in this area is hindered and becomes staff dependent; lack of documentation makes these resources fragile – if lost, they cannot be recovered easily. If misplaced, they cannot be found.  

The Hub will be an all-digital library that aggregates metadata from libraries, museums and institutions around the world.  The purpose is to provide an easy-to-use search interface so scholars can search the records at once. The hub will link to a wide variety of different materials some of which are in the public domain, while others are under rights restrictions but nonetheless publicly viewable. Each contributing institution will be responsible for contributing their rights statement and making decisions on the copyright status of their items.

Prototyping

This grant has provided the funds for us to take the time to explore and find special collections, archives, hidden and fragile collections that can support the research of African poetry in all cultures and forms. We have taken the time to include what we think is or could be relevant and will discuss this at our Spring Working Meeting together to identify which items will be included in the Collections Hub Prototype.
 
First Survey period
This information has given us a broad scan of the relevant collections and items with sufficient details to help us make decisions on what to include in the prototype of the Collections Hub.  
 
Second Survey Period
If needed this will provide the additional data we need on the collections for the development of the prototype site. If we do not have all the information on these collections, this second survey period will give you an opportunity to find those collections/items and complete the data.

Defining African Poetry

Fully aware that our intent is to fault on the expansive than the exclusive, we have sought to have a generous and malleable, pragmatic, and correctible definition of “Poetry”, and we have done so by developing a working list of what would be of interest to the project in this regard. We seek to recognize the various technologies of communication, broadcast, and preservation of traditions and how they may inform how “poetry” is carried in different cultures, and to be open to these forms. We are very interested in how scholars and practitioners define what constitutes poetry in their traditions. Above all, while we appreciate that poetry can be a vehicle for conveying ideas related to history, genealogy, social organization, politics, anthropology, etc., we are primarily engaged in matters of aesthetics and the poetic—the use of language, the use of form, the use of rhetoric to convey ideas. We are fully aware of how fraught these terms are, but believe they are good places to begin this process of discovery. Our work, we hope, will give scholars and artists the opportunity to develop new terms that reflect the evolution of the poetic or poetry in Africa. Below is the working list that is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive:

  1. Conventionally published poetry in books, journals, periodicals and other printer sources that parallel traditional notions of published poetry (Western, Arabic, Swahili) etc.

  2. Work that various cultures and language groups in Africa define as “poetry”

  3. Proverbial traditions, Aphorisms, Sayings, and other formally defined expressions that function in various cultures and traditions

  4. Where spoken, expressed or written language is employed in song, incantation, religious practice, etc., we consider these are “poetic” expressions.

  5. The existence of written or symbological means of communication on art, runes, design, that return to the use of language as part of a convention would be of interest.

  6. We recognize the distinction between “written” and “oral” vehicles of “publishing” poetry and consider all valid and necessary areas of interest for our work.

  7. We therefore are interested in recorded performances of oral poetic expressions.