Islam West Africa Collection

Directed by Frédérick Madore, the Islam West Africa Collection is a collaborative, open-access digital database that currently contains over 5,000 archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications of various kinds, audio and video recordings, and photographs on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Togo and Côte dIvoire. Most of the documents are in French, but some are also available in Hausa, Arabic, Dendi, and English. The site also indexes over 750 references to relevant books, book chapters, book reviews, journal articles, dissertations, theses, reports and blog posts. In addition to assigning detailed metadata, optical character recognition (OCR) has also been applied to each document in order to index the full text. It is therefore possible to carry out a simple search by keyword or an advanced search by combining several criteria on the thousands of documents contained in the database. An index of over 1800 events, locations, organizations, people, and topics is also available. The online archiving of research data, which can be consulted without financial barriers, is an interesting alternative for both West African and foreign researchers to overcome the difficulties often encountered in libraries and archives in the region. Above all, this project aims to democratise access to documents of all kinds on Islam in West Africa, to pave the way for new research on this topic, and, above all, to serve as a model for other similar initiatives.