[ BAS Online Main Page and Organizational/Individual Subscriptions ]
Scholars of Asian studies throughout the world who do not yet have access to the remarkable resource Bibliography of Asian Studies Online, should contact their institutions to explore opening a subscription. Instructions to librarians for testing the BAS Online are given below.
From 1941 to 1991 the Bibliography of Asian Studies was widely recognized as the standard bibliographical tool in the field of Asian studies. However, the process of compiling and printing these increasingly bulky volumes led to delays in appearance of the annual editions. The Board of Directors of the Association for Asian Studies took the innovative steps to convert the BAS to an electronic database, incorporating all entries from the print volumes for the years 1971 to 1991 and entering all fresh citations from 1991 forward in electronic form.
As of February 2008, the BAS Online contains close to 700,000 references to books, journal articles, individually-authored monographs, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, and Festschriften, etc., published from 1971 until the present day. It encompasses the full content of the annual printed volumes of the BAS from the 1971 to the 1991 editions (the 1991 edition was the last volume available in print form). In addition, there are many references to publications after 1991, including citations to all articles from the 100 most-used journals in Asian studies (up to the present in many cases), and a substantial number of additional citations from earlier years in South Asian studies. A dedicated editorial team led by Anna Leon Shulman is at work compiling current citations and retrospectively in-filling citations, particularly from general and comparative sources not cataloged as Asia-related.
Librarians wishing to test the BAS Online should write to Lisa Hanselman, lhanselman@aasianst.org.
Frank F. Conlon
Managing Director,
BAS Online
Thanks are due to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided the funds for electronic provision of the BAS; to William B. Hauser who as chair of the BAS advisory committee managed the process; and to the late David Wyatt who prepared the files (including scanning in the early volumes by hand). The job of getting the dataset onto the Internet is being carried out by Digital Library Production Services (DLPS) at the University of Michigan Library, best known for the Humanities Text Initiative; thanks go out to the former head of DLPS, John Price-Wilkin, his successor Perry Willett, and to all of the staff at DLPS. The editor of the BAS is Anna Leon Shulman with Associate Editors, John Leroy, Aruna Pulipaka Magier, John Rogers, and Frank Joseph Shulman. The Managing Director of the BAS is Frank F. Conlon. The BAS Advisory Committee membership at present includes: Allen Riedy (Chair), Sharon Domier, Charles Hayford, Martin Heijdra, David Magier and Michael Paschal (ex-officio).