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This is a two-part review: first, a reviewin the standard sense of a valuable revised resource in Yemenibibliography; second, a general broadside on the dangers of printbibliographies after the internet.
The World Bibliographic Series, published byCLIO Press, is a monumental exercise. The overall goal is to providebook-length bibliographies on every country (including major cities)in the world. The current listing is a little over 200 titles. Theeditors assure us that each volume "seeks to achieve, by use ofcareful selectivity and critical assessment of the literature, anexpression of the country and an appreciation of its nature andnational aspirations, to guide the reader towards an understanding ofits importance" (v). Volume number 50 in the series is on Yemen. The present volume is a revised edition of the 1984 original compiledby Prof. G. Rex Smith, a noted British historian of Yemen. Therevision was carried out by Paul Auchterlonie and is quite extensive,reflecting the fact that a lot of quality material has been publishedsince the early 1980s.
Auchterlonie provides a succint summary ofYemeni history in the "Introduction" (pp. xv-xxii), including theresults of the April, 1997 election. The bibliography itselfconsists of 938 items, all of which are annotated (most in 3-4lines). The pithy annotations make this a very handy guide. This isa topical listing, but indexes are provided of authors and editors,titles, and subjects. The specific topics include: The Country andIts People; Geography and Geology; Travel Guides; Traveller'sAccounts and Exploration; Flora and Fauna; Prehistory andArchaeology; History, Population and Demography; Minorities; OverseasPopulations; Languages and Dialects; Religion; Social Conditions andOrganization; Social Services, Health and Welface; Politics; Law andConstitution; Administration; Foreign Relations; Economics, Financeand Banking; Trade and Industry; Agriculture, Irrigation andFisheries; Employment, Manpower and Trade Unions; Statistics;Architecture; Education and Culture; Science and Technology;Literature; Visual Arts; Music and Dance; Folklore; Libraries andArchives; Mass Media, Publishing and the Press; Periodicals; and,Bibliographies. These categories are fairly straightforward,although it is not clear what "Education and Culture" is for, apartfrom education; you will find nothing on Yemeni culture there. Also,note that you will find articles about Yemeni emigration under thetechnocratic topic of "Employment, Manpower and Trade Unions" as wellas under "Overseas Populations." Not a lot published on Yemeni tradeunions, I think it is fair to say. Under each topic, the articlesare arranged in alphabetical order.
This series emphasizes publications inEnglish, although the compiler has included a number of references inFrench, German, and Italian. This is fortunate, since English is byno means the only language for serious work in Yemeni Studies. Thereis no attempt to cover publications in Arabic. A few dissertations,as well as items appearing in more recent editions of TheEncyclopedia of Islam, are included. The work of AIYS members iswell represented. Even Yemen Update gets mention in the list ofperiodicals. I am particularly humbled by inclusion of about 18 ofmy own publications.
Overall, the compiler has done an admirablejob in choosing a cross-section of references, from the obvious tothe obscure. This is a useful resource that deserves a place on areference shelf in major libraries. The list price of $91 will, ofcourse, greatly limit its distribution among most academics' personallibraries.
So, thank you, CLIO Press for this 1/200thof your series devoted to Yemen. But, with all the good things thatcan be said about this particular bibliography, I also feel the needto interject a note of caution. Published bibliographies areincreasingly the dinosaurs of post-internet modern research. Thinkof this particular bibliography, first published in 1984. It sat onlibrary shelves for 14 years before a revised edition appeared. Given tight library budgets, there are probably any number ofuniversity libraries which will not order the revised edition. Sovirtually all recent publications, which for Yemen is rathercritical, in effect go unreferenced for those who consult volumeslike this. And the problem continues. For example, also publishedthis year, but not in time to be referenced in the present volume,are several seminal articles by Najwa Adra on Yemeni dancing,including major entries in the International Encyclopedia of Dance. So, if you want to know what is out there on Yemeni dance, thisvolume missed the boat (through no fault of the compiler). And sucha volume will continue not helping you, even though it willundoubtedly sit on that same library shelf for another 14 years ormore.
There are myriad ways of finding references. Locating a specific title or author is a breeze these days. Nowthat major library holdings are archived on the web, librarians nodoubt have fewer and fewer personal queries to deal with. Mostprinted bibliographies are subject and topic oriented; the majorityattempt to survey useful sources rather than struggling to becomprehensive. The main problem for print bibliographies is thatthey quickly go out of date. If you have been around libraries formore than a decade or so, then you will remember the volumes andvolumes of annual bibliographic indices for the social sciences,sciences and humanities -- with fascicles fostered on sagging shelvesas quick (in the archaeic sense of quick) as the presses could spewthem out. The point is that such paper-consuming approaches tobibliography are pretty much passé with the electronic mediaavailable.
About twenty-five years ago, as a beginninggraduate student, I entered into the seemingly bottomless pit ofbibliographies. In 1977 I even published a (hand-typed andpain-stakingly indexed) Bibliography of Reprints inArchaeology for something called the Anthropology CurriculumProject at the University of Georgia. Over the years I haphazardlycollected a bibliography of bibliographies on the Middle East andIslam. But most of my time was spent in the trenches hauling downdusty volumes and then going off to find some delightfully obscurejournal for the chance "find" of a rare or potentially usefularticle. A major part of my bibliographic references are devoted toYemen, although I gave up trying to update it quite a few years ago. Most of the major sources are there, including those frightfullyamateurish and often inaccurate volumes ground out by Henry Field andcompany. Among my earliest finds was reference to an 8-page documentpublished by the Library of Congress Legislative Reference Service in1965 by Manfred W. Wenner, who had managed to fill 8 pages with aselect annotated bibliography of literature between 1960 and 1965. Inever actually saw the document, but my faith in its existence hasnot wavered over the years.
There is as yet no definitive bibliographyof Yemeni bibliographies. Those interested in getting a head starton this should consult the first section of Tom Stevenson'sStudies on Yemen, 1975-1990, published by AIYS. [PaulAuchterlonie, by the way, cites Stevenson's work as "a model of itskind and the single most useful bibliography concentrating on theYemen" (p. 290).] There are all kinds of topical bibliographies,including Joke Buringa's 1992 Bibliography on Women in Yemen,also published by AIYS. Some are unpublished, sitting in officefiles of development agencies. Some are by language (e.g., Landau's1974 "Soviet books on the Yemen" in Middle Eastern Studies,10:234-237). There are also several important bibliographies inArabic, most notably from the inimitable Abdullah al-Hibshi, Yemen'sindigenous bibliographer par excellance. Then there are the broadersources, such as the very useful Index Islamicus.
The point is why do we need detailed andspecialized bibliographies in print? The drawbacks have always beenthere: most volumes are too expensive or orineted almost exclusivelyfor university libraries; all rapidly go out of date. Plus the useris always at the mercy of the ability of the compiler. This isparticularly acute when the compiler has no first-hand experiencewith the material being referenced. The main danger is that aparticular bibliography sets the stage and items not referenced arethen not consulted.
The obvious response is to go on the web. You can now access most major library card catalogs from your homecomputer. Many have sophisticated search engines to double checkthat odd reference before publication. There are any number ofbudding bibliographies out there. This spring I adapted YemenUpdate's Index Yemenicus (Yes, indeed, the title is chosen out ofadmiration for the granddaddy of all Islamic bibliographies.) to ournew website, Yemen Webdate. The idea is to update and correctannoying typographical errors continually. I now look at all viewersof the site as my extended family of proofreaders. This will serveonly as a basic database of what was published annually. It isnowhere near complete, but it will improve because it can be improvedwithout waiting for a new edition.
Serious scholars need good bibliographies. Bibliography is to academic research what adrenelin is to theathlete; if you don't have it, you will rarely excel. The bestresearch is thoroughly informed by the best previous research. Evenif the previous research is lousy, at best, you still have to knowwhat has been done. But no bibliography should be an end in itselfor a mere taxonomic trope. It is possible, although certainly notadviseable, to anally pursue every reference on a given subject, toleave no dusty library shelf unturned. And with the internetarchiving now begun, such a goal may actually be achievable in thenear future. If scientists can decode DNA, then scholars with farless acumen could come rather close to tracking down all referenceson , for example, Yemen. But while plotting the human genome hasready relevance to the human condition, plodding along to produce avirtual librome probably does not.
Even if all references ever published couldbe assembled in one giant file, what good what it serve? I am proneto say absolutely none, save the knowledge of having done so. Yes,it would be nice to have an authoritative source at one's fingertipsto double check references in publications and papers, but I worryabout the damage that might result. One danger of usingbibliographies is to cite references which are never in fact read orconsulted: reference padding is more than a periodical crime amongacademics. I know, because I succombed myself in the youthfulenthusiasm of my own dissertation writing. Another argument,seductive to the academic core, is the goal of documenting sources sothat other scholars will know where to go. Well, as long as academictenure is a sure thing, such scholars know, of course, where to go;and that well is indeed getting dryer and dryer. But I suspect thatmost bibliographies rarely serve this function, except for beginninggraduate students with time on their hands. And it would appear thatmany are simply lists copied from earlier lists, usually with theaddition of errors.
If the preceding has not bedeviled youenough, let me continue as a devilish advocate of what I see as anunhealthy reliance on existing bibliographies. I happen to thinkthat the process of compiling references, preferably ones youactually look at to see if they could be useful, is essential for ascholar. What makes it good is that it gets you to references youwould otherwise not find. But if you never in fact consult theseresources, what is the value? If what you end up with is a list ofsources rather than useful notes compiled from those sources, thereis obviously little value. Even less, if you come to think thatfinding the references deserves an academic award. References arethe necessary map of our research, but if we never take our car outof the garage we will never get anywhere.
In my youth I was seduced by a viral,seemingly vital at the time, pasttime best disguised asBibliographilia referencius. I would spend long hours in theVan Pelt Library at Penn, glorying in the open stacks even as Izigzagged between old Dewey files and newer LC stacks. Like afrenetic archaeologist set loose inside a royal tomb, I would workthe aisles in those sections that held promise for my passionateinterest in the Middle East (and an occasional odd interest in thingslike Lunatic Archaeology). In the process I took notes, at leastcopying down the references, and filed them away in notebooks thatnow cover a couple of bookshelves floor to ceiling. The notes arestill there, somewhat yellowed around the corners, but theirpotential value (which diminishes annually) pales in comparison tothe process itself. It was the absorption in books, periodicals andproceedings that was important. Throughout I had to fight thepenchant to record and record references ad nauseum. I somehowsurvived.
Bibliographies, of course, are not theproblem. Such guides are useful, even when imperfect. In fact theproblem is not so much in finding sources, even a little old-fashioedhard work in a fairly decent library can accomplish that; the problemis what to do with the knowledge that is there, what to make of it,where to go with it. Good bibliographies need seriousscholars.