Departmental Collection Finds a New Home

Fordham’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology is sharing some rare educational material with a Ghanian University.

Working through the Friends of Ghana, a non-profit organization, the department donated a collection of vintage science books and magazines, including the Journal of Science, to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). KNUST services 23,000 undergraduate and graduate students in Agriculture And Natural Resources, Architecture & Planning, Arts And Social Sciences, Engineering, Health Sciences and Science.

The Journal of Science is one of the nation’s longest-running journals covering developments in earth science. The collection will help strengthen the university’s science curriculum and research, according to Friends of Ghana CEO Joseph Johnson.

The donation was arranged with the help of student Kojo Amphah and the department’s chair Allen S. Gilbert, Ph.D., professor of sociology and anthropology. Much of the material comes from Gilbert's personal collection of science publications.

“This is a sizeable collection,” said Gilbert. “Now that everything is digital in the west, this top U.S. science journal is on JSTOR and on line. But in a developing country, institutions often don’t have the instrumentation or the subscription money to access this material digitally. Bound, hard copies are the cheapest and easiest for them.”

Friends of Ghana is sponsoring the shipping and delivery of the books and magazines to the university, located in Kumasi.