IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature

The African Elephant Bibliography is an annotated list of references on the biology, ecology and management of the African elephant developed to facilitate the work of researchers, field staff and resource managers.

The bibliography is linked to several websites including African Elephant Specialist Group (AfESG) and Save the Elephants (STE).

Hezy Shoshani's Library Endowed Collection is held at the Science and Engineering Library at Wayne State University. A trip to Detroit is incomplete without a visit.

Most articles, a number of books, and some reports may be obtained from university libraries or through an inter library loan service. Journal articles published since 2005 are located by their "document object identifier"(doi), if available.

The majority of referenced material is held by both the AfESG and Save the Elephants in Nairobi, Kenya. Both collections are publicly available. Please contact the agencies directly to review the full documents you are unable to locate elsewhere.

Paper copies not on file in these offices are referenced if available where they were seen, for example, Location: Cambridge University, England.

Post 2005 journal articles that can be accessed by a "doi" are referenced as:
Location: doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2006.08.002

Articles published in Pachyderm can be accessed here or here. 

The African Elephant Conservation Fund of the US Fish & Wildlife Service provided funding for the initial development. Almost 1800 titles were located in libraries in or near Nairobi, including those of Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the AfESG, the National Museums of Kenya, and the United Nations Environment Programme.

Additional material was collected from authors, research agencies, government offices and libraries in Southern and Eastern Africa, England, France, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States and Canada. To date, the best sources of material have been from the following university libraries:

Oxford and Cambridge, England;
Wayne State in Detroit, Michigan;
Davis Campus of the U of California;
McGill and Guelph, Canada; and
Witwatersrand, Onderstepoort and UNISA (Pretoria), South Africa,

and the libraries of the:

National Museums of Kenya, Nairobi;
National Museum of Natural History, Paris;
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science, Brussels;
Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren; and
Transvaal Museum, Pretoria.

The database is maintained by Mary Dwyer Rigby who has written the bibliographic descriptions and to whom comments regarding corrections, missed items, and new materials should be sent.

The database site was designed by Carie Gates and updated by Johnathan Thibodeau at the Chebucto Community Net, Halifax, Canada. The front web pages are maintained by Doug Rigby

This bibliography is a cooperative venture. The continuing interest and support of active researchers, as well as access to government and research offices, donor agency offices and university. The present online compilation updated March 2011, contains 5,400 documents.