A study of university libraries' home pages in Sub-Saharan Africa

The World Wide Web offers libraries the opportunity to provide library and information services to both local and international communities, and to gain access to various electronic information sources on the Internet. This is being achieved through the creation of library home pages. This paper presents the results of a study of the contents of thirteen university library home pages in eleven Sub-Saharan African countries. The study looked at the provision of access to electronic information sources and services using the World Wide Web by examining library home pages for links to internal Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs), to external OPACs, to internal electronic databases, to remote electronic databases, to CD-ROM databases, to Internet sites and to general information about the library. The major findings are that libraries are mainly providing general information about the library and its services on their home pages, and that there are no major "digital libraries" or related projects going on in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper concludes that libraries and library professionals in Sub-Saharan Africa have a rare opportunity to make a major contribution to the development of the global information infrastructure by making available some of their local, and often unique, information sources over the World Wide Web, through the library home pages they are developing.