Dear publsiher,
Dear editor,

At the moment, quite some databases and search engines on African Studies do exist. But there’s none that exclusively covers Southern African literature.
Therefore Africa Book Link is developing the Southern African Literary Database (SALiD), aimed for libraries, research centres, scholars and anyone who’s working on Southern African literature. SALiD will contain fiction, poetry, drama and literary criticism sources and materials.

Apart from the fact that SALiD exclusively focusses on Southern African literature, the advantage of SALiD over other existing databases on African studies is that it contains:

·         (e)books as well as journal and newspaper articles, book reviews, interviews, webpages, audio sources, etc.

·         old, new and even forthcoming sources

·         many Dutch and Portuguese sources (apart from the obvious English sources!)

·         many sources in Southern African languages (Afrikaans, Zulu, Sotho….)

·         many books from local African publishers

·         hyperlinks to the corresponding publishers’ and journals’ webpages

·         hyperlinks to the corresponding (e)bookstore and lIbrary pages (‘where to buy?’ and ‘where to loan?’)

·         the possiblity to browse and search on language, tribe, country, author, subject and genre

However SALiD already contains a few thousand items, it still needs to grow steadily and permanently. Therefore we call upon your help as publisher, journal or newspaper editor, to support us in developing SALiD.

So, if you want your books or articles to figure in SALiD, please provide us with an excel sheet that contains at least the following fields:

·         Title (with a hyperlink to the corresponding page on your website)

·         Journal issue (in case of an article, interview or book review!)

·         Author

·         Year of publication

·         topic(s)/tags

Let us all cooperate in making the Southern African Literary Database (SALiD) become a reference tool on Southern African literature.

KInd regards,
 
Gilbert Braspenning (Editor Africa Book Link)
Boechout, Belgium
 
info@africabooklink.com or gilbert.braspenning@gmail.com
www.africabooklink.com