Launched in 2021 by Frédérick Madore, the Islam Burkina Faso Collection is an open access digital database containing over 2,900 archival documents, newspaper articles, Islamic publications of various kinds, and photographs on Islam and Muslims in Burkina Faso since the 1960s. The site also indexes more than 275 bibliographical references of books, book chapters, book reviews, journal articles, dissertations, theses, and reports on the topic.

In addition to assigning detailed metadata, optical character recognition (OCR) has also been applied to each document in order to index the full text. It is therefore possible to carry out a simple search by keyword or an advanced search by combining several criteria among the thousands of documents contained in the database. An index of around 1000 events, locations, organizations, people, and topics is also available.

The online archiving of research data, which can be consulted without financial barriers, is an interesting alternative for both West African and foreign researchers to overcome the difficulties often encountered in libraries and archives in the region. Above all, this project aims to democratize access to documents of all kinds on Islam in Burkina Faso, to pave the way for new research on this topic, and, above all, to serve as a model for other similar initiatives.

La base de données est aussi disponible en français.