Africa Commons

Africa Commons is a platform for discovering African historical and cultural materials held by organizations around the world. It searches across over 250,000 documents from over 2,100 collections and over 600 organizations, including libraries, museums, and archives, and then it links outward to the web repositories where the documents are located. Material types include books, magazines, newspapers, historical periodicals, government documents, manuscripts, letters, diaries, posters, photographs, ephemera, art, music, videos, oral histories, and more.

Africa Commons was developed with an advisory board of African scholars. It includes many items that have been fully digitized and indexed, and it also includes finding aids that can be used to identify non-digitized materials held by libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions. Many of the collections in Africa Commons are held by institutions in Africa, and Coherent Digital is working with African institutions to digitize additional materials. Africa Commons also includes significant African materials held by organizations around the world. It also includes born-digital materials archived from various organizational websites. Organizations and individual members of Africa Commons may contribute links and files to the platform. Uploaded content and links are reviewed by Coherent Digital.

On the Africa Commons platform, Rutgers has access to the History and Culture module. Rutgers does not have access to any other modules that may be released on this platform.