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About the BAS • History of the BAS • Scope Notes • Fast-track Journal List • Subject Classification of the BAS • Organization of BAS Entries • Acknowledgments

History of the Bibliography of Asian Studies

The history of the Bibliography of Asian Studies before its present electronic form can roughly be divided into three parts: paper compilation before 1982, computer compilation since 1982, and the building of an electronic cumulative version. There are separate pages available on its scope, its organization and its subject classification scheme. There is also a full acknowledgments page.

**The compilation of the printed Bibliography of Asian Studies (–1982)**

The BAS has its origins in an annual bibliography compiled by E. H. Pritchard in 1936. Pritchard and others subsequently compiled bibliographical appendixes to quarterly numbers of the Far Eastern Quarterly (FEQ), beginning in late 1941. The scope of the Far Eastern Bibliography, originally limited to East Asia, was expanded to cover both books and periodical articles on all of the countries of East and Southeast Asia (1941) and subsequently on South Asia (1955). With the change in name of the association's journal from the Far Eastern Quarterly to the Journal of Asian Studies (1956), each compilation of the bibliographical entries began to appear separately as a fifth number of the journal, entitled the Bibliography of Asian Studies. Cumulative printed volumes covering 1941 to 1965, and 1966 to 1970, were published by G. K. Hall in 1969 and 1972-73 respectively.

Begun as a volunteer effort on the part of a few members of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), with editorial responsibilities shifting from university to university over the years, the BAS gradually came to be compiled with paid labor, initially with student assistants and later with a group of part-time professionals. Its total coverage grew dramatically during the 1960s and the early 1970s to a point where the AAS twice attempted to utilize computer technology for what had become a very complex enterprise. In 1973, the compilation was contracted to the Knowledge Availability Systems Center at the University of Pittsburgh, who, farming out area coverage to some graduate students and librarians, produced the annual volumes for 1972 to 1974. This experience proved to be a major disaster: the number of new items that were added each year dropped by 55% to under 7,000, and the BAS reached a point where its viability was called into question.

The Association responded by reestablishing control over the compilation of the BAS under the direction of a full-time editor based at Yale University, with responsibility for Asia in general and for Southeast Asia, assisted by contracted half-time assistant editors for South Asia and for East Asia based at the universities of Michigan and Hawaii (later Maryland). The number of items included annually immediately returned to the 15,000-16,000 range. The new team, however, was unable to catch up sufficiently to recover from the delays occasioned by the switch away from Pittsburgh and even began to fall further behind, resulting in complaints from the membership of the AAS.

**The compilation of the printed Bibliography of Asian Studies (1982-1997)**

By the time of the compilation for 1982, it was clear that the BAS required thoughtful study and review. A Task Force on the Computerization of the Bibliography of Asian Studies, formed by the Association and supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, undertook a survey of BAS users and scrutinized its operations. The technology of compilation was an obvious target of scrutiny. Compilation of entries for the BAS had been undertaken by typing bibliographical information on 3 x 5 cards. The simple, mechanical task of stamping a number on each card alone consumed an entire week. The information on the cards was then re-typed on carefully proofread pages; diacritics had to be added by hand. The then-emerging microcomputer technology offered an obvious opportunity to make this process speedier, more accurate, and more cost-effective.

A second opportunity for reform lay in the Bibliography's classification scheme. The classification system then in use had changed little from the 1950s, and was inadequate in two ways. First, it was intellectually out of date. Second, because the scheme was so general, it produced scores and in certain cases even hundreds of entries under a single subheading, thereby making user searches inefficient in precisely the most heavily-consulted subject areas, such as Indian government and politics, modern Chinese history, or Japanese economics. Computer-based reform would enable compilers to implement a more detailed classification scheme than could be committed to memory. A revision was also needed for a possible multi-year cumulation.

Meeting in the Autumn of 1984, the Association's Board of Directors accepted the Task Force recommendations and appointed a new Advisory Committee for the BAS, charging it to undertake computerization as rapidly as possible. This new Advisory Committee determined that the best course of action was to enter the bibliographical data directly into decentralized microcomputers, centrally edit and cumulate these files, and use the same machines to produce camera-ready copy for publication on paper. Because the data contained many diacritical marks in a score of languages, the only cost-effective computer system with the required capabilities at that time was the Apple Macintosh. In addition, the availability of the Apple LaserWriter printer made it possible to produce camera-ready copy with what was thought to be minor difficulty. Accordingly, the AAS purchased the requisite hardware and software, and the Committee itself began to develop procedures and programs to edit, index, and print the necessary material. Thanks to a prodigious amount of volunteer work, a workable system was created.

By the Autumn of 1985, the general and area editors were entering and cumulating all of the bibliographical data for 1982 imprints directly into their respective computers, and this compilation was finally completed and published in September 1987. In the course of this transition, the central operations of the BAS were moved to California, where the new editor, Wayne Surdam, with assistance from George L. Hart and a number of their friends, managed to publish the two volumes for 1983 and 1984 in 1988-89, the 1985 volume in March 1990, and the 1986 volume in June 1991.

While compilation technology was being reformed, the Advisory Committee members worked on devising a new system of subject classification. This effort was subsequently shelved in the face of their realization of the formidable difficulties of retrospectively applying a new subject classification to the hundreds of thousands of entries already classified under the old classification scheme. This is now deemed less urgent given the possibility of querying the old database using title and/or subject keyword searches.

**The building of an electronic cumulative version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies (1991-1998)**

With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Bibliography of Asian Studies began making progress towards reducing the time-lag of its annual publication. Subsequent support from the National Endowment for the Humanities early in the 1990s made it possible to revive efforts at creating a cumulative BAS.

The first problem to be faced was the addition of the 158,000 entries within the printed volumes for 1971-1981. Preliminary investigations and tests optimistically suggested that the BAS entries were so regularly formatted that the existing volumes could be scanned, and that the scanned files could then be run through a computer program that would reindex all of the entries into the same format as the current files. The cumulation effort, undertaken by David K. Wyatt, proved to be far more problematic than envisioned. Not only was it difficult to retrieve the files that were already available on disks and to make them internally consistent, but the scanned volumes themselves were also quite resistant to cumulation. In all cases, the optical scanning procedure was dependent on very clean copies of the pages of the original volumes, and even the slightest blemishes on a page were at times picked up by the scanner and rendered as alphabetic letters. The so-called "Pittsburgh" volumes (see above) presented a large additional set of problems, with non-standard, ambiguous, or unexplained abbreviations for the names of periodicals, and an idiosyncratic classification system. The 1971 volume had unusual subject combinations, to the point where most of the volume required reclassification. Finally, the presence of duplicate entries (often with slight variations) became increasingly apparent, and this matter had to be appropriately addressed.

The original goal was to develop a CD-ROM database of all of these files, including a search engine. The very format of the BAS, which includes many languages using scores of various diacritics, made such a development more difficult than imagined. Furthermore, rapid technological advances resulted in requests from scholars and libraries for the development of an on-line version. It is this version, developed by the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that constitutes the present database. It was released to the public on July 1, 1998 with 420,000 entries.

A separate full acknowledgments page is available. Here, however, we wish to mention the successive editors of the printed BAS: Thein Swe (1971 volume), the Knowledge Availability Systems of the University of Pittsburgh (1972-1974 volumes), Estrella Bryant (1975-1982 volumes), Richard B. Martin (1982 volume production), Wayne Surdam (1983-1986 volumes), and Anna Leon Shulman (1988-1991 volumes).

The compilation of the current electronic Bibliography of Asian Studies (1998-)

The decade since the early 1990s has been marked not only by the development of an electronic cumulative version of the Bibliography of Asian Studies but also by several other significant changes and advances. Anna Leon Shulman was appointed editor in 1993, and the BAS editorial office moved to College Park, Maryland. The production of the bibliography became more regularized. The number of records added each year substantially increased—from around 18,000 to well over 25,000—and by 2003 the total coverage of the electronic cumulative version had grown by some 275,000 additional entries. The adoption of a new database input program—FileMaker Pro replaced Microsoft File—and the creation of a new bibliographical data entry form for individual records in 1999 permitted the assignment of up to six subject headings for each new entry. (The previous practice, dating back to the 1940s, was to assign only a single subject.) Expanded title glosses and keywords also could now be provided, and individual entries could be coded by language (English, French, German, etc.) in order to enable users of the BAS in the future to limit their subject searches by language as well as by year and type of publication. In addition, the editor initiated an ongoing, labor-intensive effort to increase bibliographical consistency among the entries that scores of contributors had compiled over nearly thirty years, to eliminate as many of the duplicate entries as possible, and to identify and correct a wide range of bibliographical and typographical errors that had crept into the BAS from 1971 onwards.

In light of the fact that an increasing percentage of the book-length publications on Asia were appearing in the form of edited volumes (these include conference proceedings, Festschriften and anthologies), a concerted effort was made to expand the coverage of the edited volumes that deal either in their entirety or just in part with one or more countries of Asia. Tens of thousands of chapters in these works have been indexed in recent years, but it would be unrealistic for anyone to expect that this type of publication will ever be exhaustively covered. Likewise, efforts were redirected towards indexing a larger percentage of the articles published in monthly, quarterly, semiannual and annual periodicals that deal with Asia, and one part-time associate editor has been adding modified records to the BAS from other electronic databases for articles on Asia that appear in selected non-area periodicals, particularly within the social sciences. In addition, a number of journals dealing with East, South and Southeast Asia—some dating as far back as the late 1800s—have been retrospectively indexed. Altogether, this ongoing work is aimed at increasing the scholarly and research value of the bibliography as well as improving its authoritativeness and ease of use.