Introduction
The Yoruba Collection of William and Berta Bascom was curated by Dr. William Bascom (1912-1981), an anthropologist who was a faculty member at Northwestern University and then at the University of California, Berkeley. The Bascom Collection has been held at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley since 1983, when Dr. Berta Montero Bascom donated it.
The collection includes 470 comprehensive volumes, dating from 1841 to 1973, about the Yoruba language, culture, and people of Nigeria. Norman Ross Publishing produced a microfiche edition in the mid-1990s, and the University of Illinois Library holds the microfiche collection in the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library. The University Library's microfiche collection is almost complete. Volumes 286-315 have been missing for several years.
To learn more about the collection, read the Guide to the Microfiche Edition, from Norman Ross Publishing and available through ProQuest.
The Website
Mariah Schaefer, International and Area Studies Library graduate assistant, digitized the title pages and tables of contents of the volumes found in the University of Illinois Library microfiche collection. These scans are meant to give patrons a better idea of what each volume contains so they can better browse the collection. This website is an experimental use of the Scalar digital publishing platform with the aim of increasing accessibility to languages spoken across the globe.
The volumes are displayed in two different ways on the website. The first is a list of all the scanned volumes in numerical order, which allows the user to quickly access a specific volume. The second is separated by call number, which more closely reflects how the microfiche collection is organized at the University of Illinois Library. Pages might take a few seconds to load.
Subject Specialist
Questions about the Yoruba language, culture, or people? Atoma Batoma, the African Studies Librarian at the University of Illinois Library, is available to help and can be reached at batoma@illinois.edu. The library's Africana Collection is a great resource for African Studies research.