| The manuscripts that are listed under “Kano” are drawn from three collections housed at the Africana Library at Northwestern University that were entered in the AMMS by staff there in 1990/91. While they are not exclusively drawn from Kano, they are indicative of Northern Nigeria’s rich literary heritage. AMMS # 2055-2614 come from the Paden Collection, acquired by John Paden for Northwestern in the 1970s; AMMS entries # 2615-5948, labeled “Falke,” come from the ‘Umar Falke library, also acquired by Northwestern in the 1970s; and AMMS entries #2949 – 6263, identified as “Hunwick” from Professor John Hunwick’s collection. |
| The “Kano” collections have been surveyed in two articles: Abdullahi Mohammed and Richard Hay, Jr., “Analysis of a West African Library: the Falke Collection” in Benjamin Mittman, Personalized Data Base Systems (New York, 1975) 77-96; and the Paden collection is reviewed by E. Saad, History in Africa, 7, 1980, 369-72. By comparison to the compilations of manuscripts from ‘national’ collections that appear in AMMS and which feature heavy concentrations of classical texts, the Paden and Falke private libraries tend to privilege contemporary, | twentieth-century material heavily influenced by writings associated with the Tijaniyya tariqa. Saad estimated that about one-half of the Paden accessions were privately printed pamphlets and books from Kano, Zaria and Cairo. Like the private library that makes up the Boutilimit collection, the Falke entries hold special interest as the library of an individual bibliophile. |
| The Kano collections are available at the Africana Library of Northwestern University, Evanston, Il.. |
| Serial entries of AMMS entries appear as the record numbers for the AMMS; citations to the actual manuscripts appear under “collection number” for the individual entries where the separate “Paden”, “Falke”, and “Hunwick” collections are annotated. Use of the “GO TO” feature for individual collections (see ‘Search Tips’) permits researches to access any one of these sub-sets of the “Kano” listings. Unlike the other AMMS entries that were input at the University of Illinois and therefore benefit from some degree of consistency (inclusive, no doubt, of similar errors), this set of entries was independently entered in AMMS at Northwestern. | One result of the differing input venues is that the system for identifying authors in the “Kano” entries differs slightly from that used in the other collections consolidated in AMMS. Where classical texts and local authors could be easily identified from the Northwestern entry system an effort has been made to edit those entries to conform with other AMMS references. The ‘Kano’ collections include a somewhat larger number of fragments and partial texts that have not been possible to identify by comparison to the other entries in AMMS. |
| The range of subject headings used in AMMS represent an effort to apply the subject headings developed for the Boutilimit and Nouakchott collections, but in cases where there was a minimal level of detail annotated, the subject headings have been reconstructed from titles where these are available. The identification of subject matter in the “Kano” listings, while roughly parallel to the subject headings employed in the other collections, tends not to be as complete nor in uniform conformity with the other AMMS.3 entries. | Subject rubrics are classifications that would make sense to a student of the Islamic sciences and to be consistent across English and Arabic entries, but in a few cases there may be slight variance across these fields. Correspondence presented special problems that were solved, where the content was discernable from a title or by the annotator in the field, by grouping this into three broad, not unambiguous rubrics: politics, economy and society. |
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