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INTERNET RESOURCES: Southeast Asian Studies: Online resources

by Lisa Klopfer

About the author

Lisa Klopfer is a librarian and assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University, e-mail: lklopfer@emich.edu

Southeast Asia is recognized as a political and geographical region, but explorations on the

Internet delineate other possible boundaries and categories. Many Web sites cluster by function (commerce, education, politics) rather than region. The business, commerce and news Web sites, for example, tend to encompass a virtual network of larger cities and production areas in East and Southeast Asia that does not correspond to a single region. The culture and nature sites are also not as much regional as archipelagic, hopping from one park or ethnic enclave to the next. While commercial interests lean towards the magnet of East Asia, many of the academic centers are in Australia, the United States, and former colonial powers.

This article cites resources for the following countries: Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia (Kampuchea), East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. I have omitted sites that are only about the Vietnam War. I have selected resources that I consider to be most significant for academic studies, with a slight emphasis on Web sites that are more likely to be missed or overlooked in a simple search. In selecting Web sites from the ever-growing pool, I considered navigability and design as well as currency and the quality of content. The Internet resources discussed here are only a small portion of what is available.

Internet search engines

Global search engines and Web directories like

Google (http://www.google.com) do a good job for most Southeast Asian sites in English, Indonesian, or Malay. For languages that use other fonts, it is useful to go to specific search pages such as those listed on Search Engine Colossus at http:// www.searchenginecolossus.com/.

Electronic lists

• Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia List (CORMOSEA).Hosted by Ohio University, this list is only accessible by email. For more information, e-mail Kent Mulliner (owner of the list) mulliner@ohio.edu. To subscribe, send a message to listserv@ohio.edu and in the body of the message type “subscribe cormosea your full name.”

• H-Southeast Asia List.Also hosted by Michigan State University, this list is part of H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine. It focuses on the history of Southeast Asia, posting discussion logs, book reviews, job announcements, and events. Archived messages may be read on the Web without logging in. Access: http:// www2. h-net .msu. edu/~seasia/.

• Southeast Asia List.This list, hosted by Michigan State University, distributes news on Southeast Asia events, announcements of conferences, publications, and calls for papers, and other items of interest dealing with Southeast Asia. To subscribe, send a message to listserv@msu.edu containing the text “subscribe SEASIA-L your full name.” Or subscribe via the Web. Access: http://list.msu.edu/cgibin/waPSUBED 1 =seasia-l&A= 1.

Gateways

• AsiaSource.This huge portal is sponsored by the Asia Society. It links to news, business resources, resources for teachers, a database of Asian foods, and recipes. If you only want to visit one site for Southeast Asia, this is the one. Searching the site is not as helpful as browsing deeper into the collections by clicking on links. Access: http://www.asiasource.org/.

• Asiaville.The site offers selected links to business and cultural information for most Asian countries, including all of Southeast Asia, except East Timor. Click on “sitemap” for a list of countries. Access: http://www.asiaville.com.

• East and Southeast Asia: Net Resources.Maintained by Robert Y. Eng of the University of Redlands, this site provides pages of Internet resources with an emphasis on political issues and history. While slightly less comprehensive than some of the Southeast Asia WWW Virtual Library pages, these have the advantage of being more frequently updated. Access: http:// newton.uor.edu/Departments&Programs/ AsianStudiesDept/.

• Library of Congress Country Studies/ Area Handbook Series.The Web site contains online versions of country studies previously published by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, a program sponsored by the U.S. Army. The historical overviews are useful, but researchers should note the publication dates, as some of these works are no longer current. Access: http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/.

• SEAsite—Southeast Asian Languages and Cultures.This site, sponsored by Northern Illinois University (NIU), is an excellent starting place for Southeast Asian studies. The sections about countries are rich, particularly for language studies; the site hosts a number of online lecture notes and images from NIU professors, and there is a trivia quiz game. Access: http://www. seasite.niu.edu/.

• Southeast Asia WWW Virtual Library.This directory keeps track of Web information sources for the Southeast Asian section of the Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library. This is a starting place for exploration, but pages vary in how well they are maintained. The most useful information is not regional, but country specific. The site links to specific countries’ pages maintained by other participants in the WWW Virtual Ubrary Project. Access: http://iias.leidenuniv.nl/ wwwvl/southeast.html.

Collections and bibliographical resources

• Abia South and Southeast Asia Art and Archeology Index.This online database continues the “Annual Bibliography of Indian Archaeology.” It indexes scholarly monographs, articles in periodicals, Ph.D. theses, and relevant grey literature in multiple languages. The interface is difficult to manage and, at the time of evaluation, the help files were not accessible. Nonetheless, a simple “all fields” search generates useful and unusual citations. Access: http://www.abia. net/.

• ANU Library Southeast Asian Serials.This database is from Australia National University in collaboration with the library of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands. The index covers 130 journals published in Southeast Asia (chiefly Indonesia), Australia, Europe, and the United States. The earliest entries are from 1990. Keywords for searching are in English, even when the record is for material in Indonesian or a European language. Search by title, author, keyword, or year of publication. The results include a full bibliographic record and (in some cases) options to order the source from ANU or KITLV. Access: http://database.anu.edu.au/asia/indo/new/.

• Berkeley South/Southeast Asia Library Service (SSEAL).While this site is primarily focused on the collections at University of California-Berkeley, it includes a solid women’s studies bibliography, as well as links to the major Southeast Asia journals, libraries, and book dealers. Access: http:// www.lib.berkeley.edu/SSEAl/SoutheastAsia/.

• The Digital Initiative Program, University of Washington Libraries.This site hosts searchable image databases from a variety of regions, including Southeast Asia, on themes that include exploration, labor, art and architecture, and the natural world. Images include photographs, documents, slide shows, and illustrations. Access: http://content.lib.washington.edu/ index.html.

Individual countries

Brunei

• BruNet.This is a comprehensive Internet service offering e-mail hosting and advertising as well as listings for news, tourism, and commerce resources. Access: http://www.brunet.bn/.

• Government of Brunei Darussalam official Web site.This site has English and Bahasa Brunei (Malay) content, with links to all the government ministries. It includes maps, an official history of the country, and online official news in both languages. Access, http://www.brunei.gov. bn/index.htm.

Burma (Mynmαr)

• Bibliography of Secondary Burma Studies Literature.Created by Michael W. Charney, this is a very large PDF file (the document is more than 130 pages), so viewing it over a telephone connection is not recommended. Access: http://www.seastudies.org/burmastudies/ secondary.htm.

• Free Burma.This site does not hide its political message, although it is difficult to determine who exactly maintains the page. Access: http://www.ibiblio.org/freeburma/. It is funded in part by the Soros Foundation, which hosts its own site, The Burma Project, which contains current information on human rights issues in Burma, as well as links to like-minded organizations. Access: http://www.soros.org/burma/.

• Irrawaddy.This is an English-language online magazine published by exiled Burmese covering popular culture, politics, and business. There are interviews with leading intellectuals, such as Vaclav Havel and Aung San Suu Kyi. Some articles are available without subscription. The site may not load properly in Netscape browsers. Access: http://www.irrawaddy.org/.

• Myanmar.com.In contrast to the previous three sites, Myanmar.com is an officially sanctioned portal to news and government resources. Access: http://www. myanmar. com/.

• Selective Works on Myanmar History, Culture, Archeology and Literature After Independence.This subject guide from the University of Washington Libraries has just arrived on the Web and is still being built. It includes full-text English-language articles in PDF format and a set of short biographies of major figures in recent Burmese history. Best viewed with Internet Explorer. Access: http://www.lib. washington.edu/asp/myanmar/.

Cambodiα

• Cambodia in Modem History: Beauty and Darkness.This site is maintained by Bruce Sharp, an American who is married to a Cambodian exile. It contains a small collection of essays, personal histories (in English), and photographs documenting the Pol Pot years and its aftermath into the present time. Clearly a labor of love, it is not comprehensive, but is compelling. Access: http://www.mekong.net/ cambodia/.

• Cambodian Genocide Program.On a larger scale, Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program documents the horror that ended 1.7 million lives. There are links to full-text newspaper and journal articles and photograph collections. The core of the site is made of up databases: a bibliographic collection containing records of nearly 3,000 primary and secondary documents dealing with atrocities in the Khmer Rouge regime; a biographic index of more than 19,000 records on Khmer Rouge military and political leaders and some victims of the Khmer Rouge; and a photographic database of more than 5,000 prisoner mug shots taken at the Tuol Sleng Prison. Access: http://www.yale.edu/cgp/.

East Timor

• Bibliography of East Timor.Bibliography of East Timor by Robert Lawless is a well-maintained online bibliography of scholarly books and articles on East Timor society and history. Access: http://coombs .anu.edu.au/Biblio/ biblio_etimor.html.

• East Timor Action Group.East Timor Action Group is one of the leading organizations supporting the independence of East Timor. The main advantage of its Web site for academic users is the large set of links to other East Timor and Indonesia sites. Access: http://etan.org/resource/ websites.htm.

• Mother Jones East Timor Reference Section.Mother Jones East Timor Reference Section is a simply organized set of pages with basic facts about the country and a glossary. It is a nice starting place for beginners. Access: http://www.motherjones.com/east_timor/ reference/.

• United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).This site contains a wealth of United Nations documents (in PDF format), a background chronology beginning in I960, and a good-quality map of the whole island. Access: http://www.un.org/peace/etimor/ etimor.htm.

Indonesia

• Atlas Mutual Heritage.Atlas Mutual Heritage is a database containing a complete survey of Dutch East India Company settlements and illustrative material of these settlements (maps, paintings, drawings, prints). It may be searched in English or Dutch. The illustrations may be viewed at different sizes. Access: http://www. atlasmutualheritage.nl/.

• Inside Indonesia magazine.Sponsored by the Australian interest group Indonesian Resources and Information Programme, this magazine offers selected essays in English by experts on topics such as globalization and press freedom. Subscription is required for the complete set of articles. The site also hosts Indonesian-language learning activities. Access: http://msideindonesia. org/.

• Learning and Research Site on Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the Islamic World.Created by John MacDougall, an American expert on Indonesia, this text-only site contains a wealth of links to online publications and other resources. Slide down the page to “panel two” for the most complete list of regional publications in Indonesia to be found on the Web. Access: http://www.indopubs.com/.

• National Library of Australia Indonesia Site.This is a good starting place for Indonesian studies. It hosts and links to bibliographies, library resources, and a wide range of Internet sites. Access: http://www.nla.gov.au/asian/indo/.

• Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection.The Indonesia section of this collection hosts 15 current and 4 historical (colonial era) maps in large JPEG image files. Access: http://www.lib .utexas.edu/maps/indonesia.html.

• Sejarah Indonesia.This year-by-year timeline of Indonesian history from 1500 to the present was created by Charles A. Gimon, an American entrepreneur. The timeline text is in English with illustrations. There is no bibliography or references cited list. Access: http:// www.gimonca.com/sejarah/.

• Tempolnteraktif.This is a major news analysis Web page, a spin-off from the Tempo weekly magazine. It is available in English, Japanese, and Indonesian. It covers current events in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, complete with letters to the editors and cartoons. Access: http:// www.tempointeractive.com/index‚uk.asp.

Laos

• Lao Study Review.This is an online journal of the Lao Studies Society, which was established in 1991. Access: http://www.global. lao.net/laostudy/laostudy.htm.

• Lao Vision Magazine.This site, produced by expatriates in the United States, focuses on the concerns of expatriates, including maintaining cultural heritage. Each issue must be downloaded in PDF to be read. Access: http://www.laovision. net/.

• Vientiane Times(the official paper). (Access: http://www.vientianetimes.gov.la/). This site is not to be confused with the commercial site VientianeTimes.com ‚ which bills itself as “the gateway to democracy” and carries news of a more critical bent, and has a much more complete set of links to Lao commercial, cultural, and political Web sites. Access: http://www.vientianetimes. com/Others.html.

Malaysia

• Malaysia Kini.This site offers independent, alternative news in English and Malaysian. Only the last seven days are available without a paid subscription. Access: http://www.malaysiakini.com/.

• Orang Asli Archive.Produced by Keene State College, the Orang Asli Archive is a repository for unpublished documents, films, tapes, and other recordings relevant to the indigenous people of peninsular Malaysia. The Web site carries a map and population statistics for orang asli, a small number of full-text articles, and information about the collection at Keene State. Access: http://www.keene.edu/library/orangasli/.

• Sejarah Melayu.This site hosts a history of the Malay Peninsula in English with lovely images but no references. The links section offers connections to Malay libraries and historical and travel sites. Unfortunately, this site comes with pop-up ads. Access: http://www.geocities.com/ Tokyo/Flats/3795/malays.htm.

Philippines

• Tagalog 2002.Tagalog 2002 is much more than a language resource. There are Englishlanguage essays on contemporary culture, a bibliography of core titles, and a guide for school teachers, as well as language lessons, grammar, glossaries, poems, songs, short stories, riddles, and more in Tagalog. Access: http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/Tagalog_mainpage.htm.

• Mindanao Homepage.This is a commercial site, but the virtual city tours (not interactive) cover more information than most, including maps, local sites of interest, and local history. Access: http://www.mindanao.com/.

Singapore

• KnowledgeNet Singapore.This site bills itself as the “Authoritative Singapore History Site.” It bases the authority in part on its association with the National Archives of Singapore. This sophisticated site presents multiple databases of text and images through three major entry ways: biographies, landscapes, and chronologies. There is also a forum for students, an e-journal with fulltext articles (some of them reprinted from published sources), and links to a small number of unusual Singapore history Web pages (such as the Germans in Singapore). Access: http://www. knowledgenet.com.sg/.

• National University of Singapore Digital Library.This collection includes original documents and bibliographies. PDF files include an 1830’s travel diary and a Chinese-language newspaper. Best of all is Tim Yap Fuan’s “A Sense of History: a select bibliography on the history of Singapore” (based on the print edition of 1998), as well as a bibliography of Singapore literary criticism. Access: http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/ecoll/ projects.html.

Thailand

• Information on 76 Provinces.Hosted by the royal Golden Jubilee Network, this site contains images and descriptions of cultural life in each province. Access: http://kanchanapisek. or.th/kρ8/oncc/.

• Leeds Thai Politics Bibliography.This comprehensive (but not current) bibliography of books and articles (no links to full text) was produced in 1998 by Michael Nelson of the University of Leeds. Access: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ thaipol/thaibibl.htm.

• Thai Fiction in Translation.Created by Marcel Barang, a journalist living in Thailand, this site offers a menu of Thai short stories, novels, or excerpts that have been translated into French or English. Access: http://www.thaifiction.com/.

• Yao Religious Culture Bibliography.Created by Barend ter Haar in Leiden, this bibliography covers scholarship of the Chinese and Thai regions of the Yao people. Many of the citations are in European languages. Access: http:// www.let.leidenuniv.nl/bth/yao.htm.

Vietnam

• Indochina Arts Partnership.This site is the result of a partnership between U.S. and Vietnamese cultural institutions. The Web page carries a calendar of arts events, lists of artists and exhibitions, one online exhibition, and links to related Web sites. It uses graphics heavily and does not appear to work on some Netscape browsers. Access: http://www.iapone.org/.

• The Vietnam Project, Texas Tech University.The Vietnam Center is dedicated to scholarship of the American experience in Vietnam, but the Web site provides a rich variety of materials unrelated to the American aspects of the Vietnamese revolution and war. The Virtual Vietnam Archive contains nearly half a million digital documents, videos, and sound files available for download. Access: http:// www.viemam.ttu.edu/.

• Vietnamese Language Homepage.From Arizona State University, this page has links to online language learning resources. Access: http://www.public.asu.edu/~ickpl/. ■