Decolonising African Collections? Academic library legacies and African Studies futures. Conversation with Jakobina Mwiiyale (Windhoek), Nora Schmidt (Vienna)

African Studies libraries have become sites of critical interrogations into knowledge production practices. Digital technological possibilities, on the one hand, and colonial legacies in acquisition, cataloguing and knowledge validation, on the other hand, provide challenges to academic library practices. Student demands, in turn, envisage wide-ranging and simple access possibilities. In this Round Table, Jakobina Mwiiyale, Head of the University of Namibia Library User Services, Nora Schmidt from the network for decolonising academic libraries in German-speaking countries reflect on the - often - hidden skills of librarian’s knowledge curation, decolonial policy and student demands.