It seems appropriate for there to be a paper at this conference on archives in Oxford relating to the Anglo-Boer War, for it was, at least in part, an imperialist war, and, as Richard Symonds has so ably chronicled in his book Oxford and Empire, the links between the two were very strong. Not so strong that there was much inclination amongst Oxonians for military service, however. Symonds draws attention to an article in the 23 May 1900 issue of the Oxford Magazine which whilst lamenting that Cambridge was providing more volunteers than Oxford took consolation in the fact that Cambridge also had more men fighting on the other side, including Generals Reitz, De Wet, Smuts and Villiers.

The collection owes its origin to the steps taken by the Colonial Office in the middle of the nineteenth century to acquire photographic material relating to Britain's overseas dependencies. Two dispatches, dated 29 and 30 November 1869 respectively, from the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Governor of British Colombia, request that ‘photographic views of noteworthy buildings and scenery be transmitted to the Colonial Office’, together with ‘photographs of individuals of various races peculiar to the colony’. Many of the volumes of early photographs of public buildings in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malaya and South Africa were sent to the Colonial Office in response to this or similar circulars, to be followed before the turn of the century by collections from the West Indian and tropical African territories. Anthropological material was received principally from the African colonies.

In a previous issue of ARD my colleague Paul Richardson provided an introduction to the establishment of The Paul Hamlyn Foundation/Code Europe Special Collection on Publishing in Africa in the Library at Oxford Brookes University. Paul writes from the perspective of an academic and a publisher and brings these particular insights to the collection. I write as a librarian and would like to discuss the establishment of the collection from that perspective.

Several events during the last year have given me an insight into the potential of a collection like this.

At the London International Book Fair in March 1998 the Southern African Book Development Education Trust organised a series of seminars under the title of ‘Publishing for Children in Africa’. Speaker after speaker spoke about the potential for development and the urgent need for support of the publishing industry in that continent.