indexes of periodicals

[David Magier]

Raffaele Torella suggested that it would be valuable to have a gopher
accessible set of indexes of the contents of Indological Journals. I
definitely agree that this would be a valuable resource. Let me 
mention some existing resources that might partially fill this need:

a) The annual print publication, The Bibliography of Asian Studies is
an excellent source of indexing and has very strong South Asian
content. It's main drawback has been the long delays in publication.
Right now it seems to be getting closer to being completely up to date
(issues for 1987 and 1988 came out recently), but the actual catch-up
may still be years away. Meanwhile, under a hefty grant from the NEH,
they are in the final stages of producing a cumulative edition on
CD-ROM which would cover approx. 20 years of data in a user-friendly
searchable form. My understanding from the publishers (The Association
for Asian Studies) is that this product will come out probably during
1995 (with annual cumulated updates thereafter), and will be
inexpensive and marketed for individual scholars.

b) The other major listserv that provides good scholarly info on India
(and all of South Asia), mostly on history but with good participation
from many other disciplines of interest to Indologists, is called
H-ASIA. The South Asia editor of H-ASIA is Prof. Frank Conlan
(historian from University of Washington, conlan at u.washington.edu). He
has announced that H-ASIA will begin posting tables of contents of
issues of a number of South Asian journals (presumably including at
least some of great interest to Indologists), and that the number of
journals covered in this informal fashion will depend upon the members
of the listserv who volunteer to contribute. This service is not an
index, of course, but as the compiler of The South Asia Gopher, which
contains many bibliographical resources and indexes of South Asia
material, I have volunteered to archive all the H-ASIA
table-of-contents postings on the SAG and to make that archive into a
keyword index. I believe this proposal is being considered by the
H-ASIA membership. To subscribe to the H-ASIA listserv, send this
email message via INTERNET to LISTSERV at uicvm.uic.edu:

      SUB H-ASIA firstname surname school

      Example:  SUB H-ASIA Chris Smith Marshall Univ.

c) A large number of South Asian journals are included in the database
of the CARL UNCOVER bibliographical index. This service, available
free online, uses scanning to input tables of contents from something
like 30,000 journals on all topics from all over the world. Users can
connect to this service and conduct keyword searches to locate entries
for particular articles, and it is even possible to purchase a
full-text copy of many articles by entering a credit card number and
having the article delivered to you by FAX. UNCOVER can be accessed by
connecting by telnet to pac.carl.org, and select the service called
PAC.

d) The South Asia Gopher contains a wide variety of bibliographic
tools and indexes to South Asian information. To connect to the SAG,
simply gopher to: <gopher.cc.columbia.edu 71>; and then navigate down
through the menus as follows (Be sure to use port 71):
CLIO Plus/SELECTED TOPICS/South Asia.

If you have gopher client software, use the following pointer ('bookmark'):
	Type=1
	Name=The South Asia Gopher
	Host=gopher.cc.columbia.edu
	Port=71
	Path=1/clioplus/scholarly/SouthAsia

---------OR, YOU MAY USE TELNET:

Simply telnet to: <columbianet.columbia.edu>. Once connected to
Columbianet, select the menu item marked "CLIO Plus." Within that menu,
you'll find an item on the list labelled "SELECTED TOPICS: Internet
Resources By Subject" Select that one, and within it you'll find the South
Asia Gopher! 

---------OR YOU MAY USE THE WORLD WIDE WEB:

If you use MOSAIC or Lynx or other web-browser, use this URL: 
     gopher://gopher.cc.columbia.edu:71/11/clioplus/scholarly/SouthAsia


QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS or SUGGESTIONS?
please contact David Magier                 magier at columbia.edu