The CBAT is a collection of thematic bibliographies covering a growing range of central themes and topics that we hope to develop into a comprehensive resource for the study of African Christianity and African theology. Many of the current search engines used in academic research deliver results that primarily come from the Northern hemisphere, and which focus on academic research that reflects the values of Western academic culture. The CBAT aims to be inclusive of resources produced regionally and in a variety of forms. We give special attention to resources that are freely accessible online so that they are readily available to students and scholars with limited or no access to libraries or electronic resources behind pay-walls. Moreover, we aim to include resources that present expressions of lived faith, although though these sections of the bibliography are often more illustrative than exhaustive.
The encyclopaedia articles and bibliographies on this website are compatible with Zotero open-source bibliographical software. This allows users who have this free software installed on their computers to directly download the bibliographical data into their personal bibliographies. To do so, users can download and install the Zotero desktop application and a browser plug-in that recognizes and allows users to save the bibliographical data embedded in the website. The plugin works best in collaboration with a Firefox-based browser. It adds an extra button to the browser that allows users to download individual bibliographical entries. In addition, there are Zotero plugins available for word processors such as Word, LibreOffice, and OpenOffice, which allow users to automatically generate bibliographical references and bibliographies by drawing on the bibliographies built with Zotero. Instruction materials for using these various tools can be found online. Users of this website can also ‘export’ the bibliographical information in BibTeX format. Registered users can download entire bibliographies in this format that is compatible with a range of bibliographical software, including Zotero.
The CBAT is a collaborative bibliography that can only be further developed with the input of its users. Those who sign up to the website can contribute bibliographical items as well as entire bibliographies in text format or (preferably) as Zotero or BibTeX compatible files. Due to the nature of this bibliography, we are also interested in user contributions that provide us with links to Open Access versions of publications already listed, or with abstracts not yet available on the website. Users are also welcome to propose new bibliographies and to actively invest in developing them as part of the preparation of a new research project or course. Click here to visit the CBAT page on this website.