This study investigated the size and distribution of university-based journals published in federal universities of North-Western Nigeria. Using an exploratory descriptive survey design, data were gathered from institutional lists, university websites, and physical serial holdings in libraries of the universities. A total of 243 journals were identified across ten universities, with Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Bayero University, Kano, and Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto collectively accounting for more than half of the total. Social sciences, arts, and humanities dominated the disciplinary distribution, while STEM, health sciences, and agriculture accounted for smaller shares. An important finding was that most university libraries did not maintain complete holdings of the journals published in the parent institution, revealing weaknesses in distribution strategy, bibliographic control and preservation. The study concludes that although journal proliferation is evident, visibility and long-term archiving remain problematic. It recommends the establishment of institutional and national journal registries, stronger archiving practices, and total migration to digital platforms to enhance access and global recognition of the journals.

‘Teaching about Transatlantic Slavery’ was a three-year professional development project for teachers centring on the Historic Collections of Balliol College, University of Oxford, and the Museum of the American Revolution (MOAR) in Philadelphia. The project grew out of Balliol’s 2021 exhibition, ‘Slavery in the Age of Revolution’, which was inspired by the work of Fellows Sudhir Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: the epic life of Toussaint Louverture (2020) and Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: enslaved women, violence and the archive (2016). This paper discusses how we approached the aims of the project, telling a fuller history by foregrounding the role of Black people in the struggle for abolition and increasing awareness of the lasting impact of transatlantic slavery on the way we live and think today. We will address how some of the challenges of working with the material in Balliol’s collections became project strengths when we learnt to navigate bias and acknowledge and elaborate on the gaps and erasures in the historical record. We also acknowledge the diverse range of people who contributed and their importance to the consequent depth and effectiveness of the project. ‘Teaching about Transatlantic Slavery’ reached forty teachers and educators from the USA and the UK and has had lasting impact. The programme allowed teachers to practise teaching with objects, artwork, and primary source documents, deepen their subject knowledge, and develop skills for engaging in sensitive and difficult conversations around complex topics.

This article examines how activists established intellectual ‘liberated areas’ by preserving and making available documents on the history of resistance in Kenya. Historical records of resistance to imperialism which had been meticulously kept by the Mau Mau, including its own library in the forest, were destroyed by the British while records kept by the British colonial administration of their own actions were burnt, deleted and dumped in the Indian Ocean. Other records were sent to London and were hidden for years. The British practice of destroying and distorting information was passed on to the government of Kenya after independence. The official history of Kenya ignores or downplays resistance to capitalism and imperialism by its people. The Kenya Resistance Archives have been rescued, collected and established by political activists, thus providing a lesson that it is possible for librarians, archivists and information scientists to remain true to their professional values if they take on the additional dimension of activism and work outside the capitalist framework.