Mission of the Nairobi Office
The Library of Congress Office, Nairobi, was established in 1966 to acquire and catalog publications in all subjects (except clinical medicine and technical agriculture) from commercial, government, and non-trade sources from eight countries in eastern Africa for the research collections of the Library of Congress. Since that time, the region covered by the Nairobi office has expanded to cover 29 African countries: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mozambique, Reunion, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Somalia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Publications are acquired not only for the Library of Congress, but also for more than 30 institutions that participate in the Cooperative Acquisitions Program. Participants are primarily U.S. university libraries.
The Nairobi office catalogs all monographs and new serial titles that are acquired, and maintains files on all issues of newspapers and other serials that are received in Nairobi.
The Nairobi office publishes the online Quarterly Index to Africana Periodical Literature. It indexes over 700 selected journals from 29 countries in Eastern, Southern, and Western Africa.
Another aspect of the Nairobi office program is the preservation of African newspapers. The approximately 300 newspaper titles being received are being preserved on microfilm. Filming is done at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. and the Library of Congress Office, New Delhi, India. Additionally, Somali newspapers are being microfiched by the New Delhi office.
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