African & Asian Unit

The African and Asian Unit is responsible for acquiring and cataloging materials published in Sub-Saharan Africa (including African islands of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans), South and Southeast Asia. In addition to cataloging English and French monographs published in the above mentioned geographic areas, the Unit is responsible for cataloging items in a variety of African and Asian languages when these are written in Roman, Brahmi-derived, or Ethiopic scripts. These languages include Akan, Amharic, Assamese, Balinese, Bambara, Bemba, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Braj, Burmese, Efik, Ewe, Fon, French Creoles, Fula, Hausa, Hindi, Gujarati, Igbo, Indonesian, Javanese, Kongo, Kannada, Khmer, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Konkani, Krio, Lao, Lingala, Lozi, Luganda, Luo, Maithili, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Mandingo, Manipuri, Marathi, Marwari, Mende, Mooré, Mundari, Nepali, Newari, Oriya, Pali, Portuguese Creoles, Prakrit, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Rundi, Sanskrit, Santali, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Sotho, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Tigrinya, Tongo, Tswana, Tulu, Tumbuka, Twi, Vietnamese, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu.

In addition, the African and Asian Unit provides acquisitions accounting support to the other divisions of HCL Technical Services.The Unit acts as a liaison to the Financial Services Department of Widener Library and specializes in the resolution of invoice problems.

Exceptions to the Unit’s responsibilities are as follows::

The acquisition and cataloging of South Asian publications in languages using Arabic script fall under the purview of the Middle Eastern Division. Although the African and Asian Unit acquires occasionally monographs from West Africa written in Arabic-derived alphabets, the cataloging of these items is also entrusted to the Middle Eastern Division.

Cataloging of materials in Afrikaans and Portuguese is performed by the Germanic and Spanish/Portuguese Divisions respectively.

Monographs entirely in Chinese or Vietnamese are offered to the Harvard-Yenching Library where they are cataloged.

Net Resources

Africana Bibliographic Sites
	Some organizations and initiatives supporting African publishing and book development
	African Studies at Harvard
Africana Vendors
	Stanford's List of Africana Bookdealers
	African Books Collective
	Africa Book Centre
	MEABooks.com (Hogarth)    --search their online catalog
	McBlain Books Online Catalog -- For best results, use Internet Explorer!
Asian Bibliographic Sites
	National Library Board of Singapore
	University of Hong Kong Libraries
	Chinese University of Hong Kong Library System
	Libraries in Calcutta
Asian Vendors
	DK Agencies
	Select Books Online --specializing in books on Southeast Asia
Miscellaneous
	International Calling Codes

The vendors and commercial sites listed above may be used by Harvard College Library Technical Services, but their inclusion here is in no way an endorsement.