article-level indexes for indology

[David Magier]

Colleagues,
In response to Joanna Kirkpatrick's query (and useful responses from 
Richard Mahoney, Allen Thrasher, and Dominik Wijastyk), one of the best 
sources for article-level information on chapters and articles in edited 
volumes, collected works and anthologies on South Asia would be the online 
Bibliography of Asian Studies. I have noticed that many of the scanned 
ToC's that Library of Congress and other libraries add to their online 
catalog records are often not keyword-searchable, and, worse, they lack the 
page numbers of the articles and chapters. (Looks like the same is true of 
the indologica.blogg.de that Dominik mentions below). But the BAS includes 
pagination, as well as all the other relevant information one would need to 
request a particular article or chapter on interlibrary loan. Nowadays, at 
least in the US, most such transactions among research libraries are 
fulfilled within a few days, usually by electronic document delivery. (That 
is, the reader requests the item online IF s/he has the full citation, as 
from the BAS, and then the request is transmitted to a holding library, 
which scans the particular pages requested and emails them to the patron or 
presents them online via a secure server). But such requests are not really 
possible if you don't have the page numbers for the desired article.

So the LC and other library table of contents records are good for browsing 
around a given book if you already know what you are looking for. But as a 
bibliographic discovery tool, the BAS is better as a searchable INDEX 
(complete with multiple subject headings, keywords, annotations, title 
translations, etc.) of tens of thousands of articles from festschrifts, 
collected works, edited volumes, conference proceedings, etc.

Bibliography of Asian Studies is published online by the Association for 
Asian Studies, at <http://www.aasianst.org/bassub.htm>. Of course, it is 
not free, but I have found that most research libraries and universities 
maintain the inexpensive institutional subscriptions on behalf of their 
scholars and students. Another nice feature is that the full-time BAS 
Associate Editor for South Asia [full disclosure: she's my wife!], herself 
a scholar of South Indian economic history, takes direct suggestions from 
the community about items to be included in the index for Indology and all 
fields of study related to South Asia. She is Aruna P. Magier 
<apk42 at columbia.edu>.

Best,

David Magier
Editor of SARAI <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/southasia/cuvl>
and
South Asia Librarian
Columbia University Libraries

--On Tuesday, August 15, 2006 3:39 PM +0100 Dominik Wujastyk 
<ucgadkw at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

> http://indologica.blogg.de/
>
> does what you want.  It is a very fine resource.  It is not a global
> catalogue, but an indology-oriented list of recent works, done by one
> person at about the rate of a departmental library's accessions' list.
>
> Best,
> Dominik
>
> On Mon, 14 Aug 2006, jkirk wrote:
>
>> What I'd like to know, and please pardon me if I should know but don't:
>> is there any online library database that lists the titles of book
>> chapters  and of titles & authors in anthologies?
>> Joanna Kirkpatrick