Ethical Considerations: The British Library’s Social History of the Gambia: Rescuing an Endangered Archive Project

This paper explores concerns that archivists in The Gambia had with a proposal to partner with me to preserve a collection of Muslim court records dating form the early colonial period. What does open access mean for struggling archives that rely on visitors to justify their existence? Is it in the best interest of African archivists to allow foreign institutions to fund the digitization and dissemination on the World Wide Web of their collections?