SCOLMA across the Years: A Personal View

This paper is based upon the after-dinner talk I was invited to give at SCOLMA's 50th Anniversary Conference in Oxford, June 2012. Although it omits some (but not all) of the more light-hearted elements of the talk, and adds some more concrete detail it retains the essential structure of the original presentation, and remains a purely personal and impressionistic view.I was pleased to be asked to give the after-dinner talk at your Golden Jubilee Conference, since it means that I will have gone full circle in my SCOLMA involvement. As a keen and young(ish) new member of the SCOLMA Committee I was invited to spend 18 months as joint organiser of what I think remains the largest event that SCOLMA has yet hosted, the 1977 Bibliography Conference marking fifteen years of SCOLMA's existence and a decade since the International Conference on African Bibliography held in Nairobi, 1967. As I became a SCOLMA office-holder there were keynote addresses and Chairman's concluding remarks. Soon after my retirement, for your 40th anniversary conference (in this same venue), Pat Larby and I were invited to perform a brief warm-up act to set the scene before the serious contributions began. And now here I am as the after-dinner speaker at your 50th anniversary (and about to reach my own 75th in a few weeks time), in what is popularly known as the 'graveyard slot'. Is there anywhere further to go? Well perhaps a mention in the 'in memoriam' section at your Diamond Jubilee ConferenceI am particularly pleased and honoured to be taking on the role of one of SCOLMA's most iconic figures, Donald Simpson, for so many years Librarian of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Donald was involved in the creation of SCOLMA those fifty years ago, he was a member of the very first SCOLMA Committee, he is the only person so far to have been Chairman twice, in both the 1960s and the 1970s, for a total of ten years and he was also the first editor (for four years) of SCOLMA's first journal, Library materials on Africa. For many years from the late 60s into the 80s Donald was SCOLMA. He was always first choice as after-dinner speaker at SCOLMA's conferences and I decided to turn for my initial inspiration to the text of his after-dinner talk at SCOLMA's Silver Jubilee Conference in May 1987.Here Donald revealed that the first proposal of the founders back in 1962 was to call the new organisation SCOAD (Standing Conference on African Documentation) and he credits Dorothy Hamerton of Chatham House with suggesting the more euphonious SCOLMA. (The Internet Urban Dictionary of slang (http://www.urbandictionary.com/) defines a SCOAD as A low-life, trashy, dirty, smelly loser of a human being so I think she and the first Committee were well advised).Donald also reminds us that Barbara Pym, the novelist, when Secretary of the International African Institute wrote to Philip Larkin, then Librarian at the University of Hull, saying that "I suppose it is a good thing that your library has joined SCOLMA, which always sounds like a kind of breakfast food, or perhaps a tonic for tired academics". Donald adds that he personally visualised a SCOLMA as a rather agreeable marine animal, something like a sea-horse.Although I was not present at SCOLMA's birth, not even as an assistant midwife, I was well aware of it. I was doing my year of training at library school at University College London, and following the option in "Oriental & African bibliography" (which I would later come to teach myself for over thirty years). The tutor was Jim Pearson, then Librarian of SOAS, later the first holder of the Chair of Professor of the Bibliography of Asia & Africa, and he told the class about the forthcoming meeting to discuss the formation of a committee to represent libraries with African studies collections and then about the actual creation of SCOLMA in April 1962 and how he was the first Chairman. There was even a question in the exam into which one could introduce comment on this! …