The Penn Libraries have substantial Africa holdings, covering all subject areas, with concentrations in history; ethnography; archaeology; Western-language African literature and media; political science and law; local non-Arabic African languages and literature; and economics. Print collections are shared among Van Pelt Library, the Penn Museum Library, and other departmental libraries.
Local African languages and their literature are an important component of the collection, with more than 5,400 titles held in 96 languages (June 2018). Well-represented languages include Swahili, Amharic, Yoruba, Afrikaans, Shona, Malagasy, and Tigrinya; recent acquisitions and gifts have strengthened Wolof, Fula, Setswana, and Hausa holdings. Complete sets of locally-published graded language textbooks in multiple editions are held for Swahili, Igbo, and Yoruba.
The Penn Libraries media collections for African studies are among the largest in the Ivy Plus group, with more than 1,000 Africa-related sound recordings and more than 2,100 videos and videostreams.
With over 145,000 volumes on-site, the Museum Library’s collections focus on publications on archaeology throughout the world, biological anthropology, cultural and linguistic anthropology, and medical anthropology, as well as archaeological sciences and cultural heritage management.