The Asian Studies WWW Monitor: late Sep 2008, Vol. 15, No. 11 (285)

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THIS ISSUE
Entries accepted for publication: 6
Entries rejected: 8
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25 Sep 2008

Harappa: The Ancient Indus Valley and the British Raj in India and Pakistan
www.harappa.com, San Francisco, CA, US.
Self-description: "The story of the ancient Indus Valley and glimpses of India and Pakistan before 1947 during the Raj. Old photographs, rare archival film footage and long unseen media from before independence in India and Pakistan in 2,000 photo pages."
Site contents:
* Images [over 770 photographs from 1845-1947 including those by Samuel Bourne 1863-1869, Fred Bremner 1883-1923, John Sache 1865-1883, William Henry Jackson 1898-1899, lithographs, wood engraving, and French, Indian, German and British postcards from 1900-1947];
* Mohenjodaro [103 indexed images];
* Movies [QuickTime format: excerpts from archival newsreels from Universal and The March of Time];
* Sounds [RealAudio & MP3 format: the voices of Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru. Interviewees include the fiction writer Attia Hosain, the Pushtun poet Ghani Khan, the Princess of Bhopal Abida Sultaan, and the veteran Punjabi politician Syed Amjad Ali];
* Indus Valley [The latest archaeological discoveries about Indus civilization];
* Bazaar [an online shop];
* The Complete Harappa Excavation Reports 1986-1990.
URL http://www.harappa.com/
Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.harappa.com/
Link reported by: Omar Khan (omar--at--harappa.com)
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Study/Documents
* Publisher [academic - business - govt. - library/museum - NGO - other]: Other
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Essential
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 3,000

24 Sep 2008

ANU College of Asia and the Pacific: News and Events
College of Asia and the Pacific (CAP), The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Self-description: "The College, established in 2005, consolidates existing ANU academic units focused on study of Australia, Asia and the Pacific and their place in the context of a globalized world."
Site contents:
* CAP (About Us, Research, News & Events, Gifts and Donations, Job Opportunities, Contact Us);
* Study@CAP (Welcome, Future Students, Current Students, Scholarships, Student Contacts, Teaching Awards);
* Information for Staff (Administration Executive College Intranet);
* Regional Specialities (List of Experts, Transnational, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Pacific Islands, Philippines, South Asia, Thailand);
* Search CAP;
* [Current] News and Events - 2008 (Disability, Disadvantage and Development in the Pacific & Asia, Diminishing Conflict Series, Graduate Studies Advisory Evening, RMAP Workshop - Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods in Mining, India Update 2008, Vietnam Update 2008, Workshop: Health, culture and religion in South Asia, Discovering histories of foreign communities in Japan: Research, archives and special collections, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, 2008 Narayanan Lecture: Why Environmentalism Needs Equity, Indonesia Update Series Volume for 2007: Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics, Capturing the Year 2007. Writing from the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Asia Pacific Week 2009 27- 30 January);
* Past News & Events - 2008;
* Today in the College;
* This Week in the College;
* Podcasts (Other News & Events around the College (FAS Calendar, FAS News, APCD Events & News, Crawford School Calendar, Crawford in the News, Regulatory Institutions Network Events, Regulatory Institutions Network News, RSPAS Seminars, RSPAS News, ANU Billboard);
* CASS/CAP Education Design Studio;
* College Blogs (East Asia Forum, Gender & Water Community Blog, Indonesia Project, New Mandala, Reconciliation Between China and Japan and the Cooperative Security Network, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program Blog);
URL http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news/
Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/news/
Link reported by: T. Matthew Ciolek (tmciolek--at--coombs.anu.edu.au)
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Corporate Info./News
* Publisher [academic - business - govt. - library/museum - NGO - other]: Academic
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Useful
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 30

23 Sep 2008

Kalasampada Digital Library - Resources of Indian Cultural Heritage
Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi, India.
Self-description: "Aims [of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts which was established in Nov 1985]: * to serve as a major resource centre for the arts, especially written, oral and visual source materials; * to undertake research and publication programmes of reference works, glossaries, dictionaries and encyclopaedia concerning the arts and the humanities; * to establish a tribal and folk arts division with a core collection for conducting systematic scientific studies and for live presentations; * to provide a forum for a creative and critical dialogue through performances, exhibitions, multi-media projections, conferences, seminars and workshops between and amongst the diverse arts, traditional and cotemporary [...]."
Site contents: * Digital Images (Archaeological Sites, Slide Collections, Multimedia Projects, Multimedia Documentation, Exhibitions, Print Material); * Photograph Collections; * Video Recordings (Gita Govinda, Brhadisvara Temple, Kutiyattam, Video Clips of Archaeological Sites of Orissa, Film & Video Documentation, Film & Video Acquired) * Audio Recordings: Music Collections; * Multimedia CD Roms Available (Ajanta, Devadasi Murai, Muktesvara, Rockart); * DVD ROMs Available (Behind the Mask, Hampi - The World Heritage Site, Oral Tradition of Vedas, Saat - Sur); * Multimedia Documentation (The Illustrated Jataka & Other Stories of the Buddha, Art & Crafts of North-East); * Newsletters and Journals of IGNCA; * Books Published by IGNCA (online Electronic Books, Series : Kalasamalocana, Kalatattvakosa, Kalamulasastra) * Papers and Essays (Indo-Chinese Studies, Nature & Cosmology, Man & Matter, Oral Traditions, Culture : Ecology, Education and Development, Multimedia) * Research Reports (Pali Tipitaka Chanting, Report on Cultural Mapping of India, Village India Project, The Viavaripa iconographic traditions 5th - 13th c. CE.); * Bibliography (An Annotated Bibliography on Zoroastrian Studies, A Select Bibliography on Shadow Puppetry, Prof. Vasudeva Saran Agrawala - A Bibliographic Survey of his Published works, Calligraphy - a Literature Search, Bibliography on Hampi - World Heritage Site); * Manuscripts Catalogue (Organization, Catalogue of Microfilmed Manuscripts, Survey of Manuscripts in India); * Databases; * Articles by In-house Scholars; * Conference Proceedings.
URL http://ignca.nic.in/dgt_0001.htm
Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://ignca.nic.in/dgt_0001.htm
Link reported by: T. Matthew Ciolek (tmciolek--at--coombs.anu.edu.au)
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Study/Documents
* Publisher [academic - business - govt. - library/museum - NGO - other]: Academic
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Essential
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 30

22 Sep 2008

DIGMAP Gazetteer [of Historical Placenames]
gaz.digmap.eu, Dusseldorf, Germany.
Self-description:
"DIGMAP - Discovering our Past World with Digitised Maps. DIGMAP is a service for resource discovery and access to old maps and related resources, with a focus on their geographic information."
Supplied note: "Colleagues, A number of times, list members have posted queries about the locations of historic places. [... Here is the] information about the gazetteer established by the EU's ambitious DIGMAP program. The URL is [listed below]:
One significant advantage of the DIGMAP gazetteer is that its creators have combined a number of existing gazetteers, including those that specialize in the location of historic placenames [such as the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) at http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/ - ed.].
I hope that this is helpful to those of you who struggle to locate places in documents that date from prior to the great territorial and placename changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. - jo."
Site contents: * Contact; * Search; * Service Interfaces.
[A potentially very useful online service in the early stages of implementation. The DIGMAP gazetteer is even more laconic (or cryptic) than the already terse services of the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) at http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/ and of the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) at www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/tgn/index.html. However, it greatly outclasses both the ADL and TGN in terms of its speed, and its use of online maps/satellite imagery published by the Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/) - ed.]
URL http://gaz.digmap.eu
Internet Archive (web.archive.org) [the site was not archived at the time of this abstract]
Link reported by: Jack Owens (owenjack--at--isu.edu), forwarded by trade-routes--at--mm.isu.edu
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Study/Documents
* Publisher [academic - business - govt. - library/museum - NGO - other]: Academic
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Useful
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 30

19 Sep 2008

The Kern Institute, Leiden
Faculty of Arts, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Self-description:
"The Kern Institute is the national centre of expertise for South Asia and the Himalayan region, more specifically India and Pakistan, Tibet and Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The institute houses the Department of Indian & Tibetan Studies of Leiden University, as well as an excellent library. The research and teaching at the Kern Institute focus on the study of the languages and history, philosophy and religions, arts and material culture of South Asian and the Himalayan region. The Kern Institute library offers excellent resources for a broad range of approaches to the study of India and surrounding countries."
Site contents:
* News; * Teaching; * Staff; * Kern Institute Library; * Special Collections (Photo Collection [Over 70,000 historic and modern photos on art and archaeology of South and Southeast Asia, over 13,000 of them are now mounted online at http://beeldbank.wsd.leidenuniv.nl/kern - ed.], Microfilms, Tibetan Collection, Archives, Sanskrit Manuscripts, Maps, Lepcha Manuscripts, Rubbings); * Projects (Van Kinsbergen, Catalogue Sanskrit Manuscripts, Tibetan Block Prints, ABIA South and Southeast Asian Art and Archaeology Index database [at http://www.abia.net/ - ed.]); * Publications; * Friends of the Institute; * Links (Indological course materials, Indological databases, Indology and courses on India elsewhere); * Contact; * Search.
URL http://www.kerninstitute.leidenuniv.nl/
Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.kerninstitute.leidenuniv.nl/
Link reported by: Marion Frenger, Bonn, Germany.
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Corporate info./Study/Documents
* Publisher [academic - business - govt. - library/museum - NGO - other]: Academic
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Essential
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 100

17 Sep 2008

Asian & Pacific Studies - Historical Photographs
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS), The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Self-description:
"This document [est. Sep 2008] is a part of Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library [http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-AsianStudies.html] and Pacific Studies WWW Virtual Library [http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-PacificStudies.html]. It keeps track of leading on-line collections of still images of value/significance to researchers in Asian and Pacific Studies. Please mail tmciolek--at--coombs.anu.edu.au if you know of relevant information resource not in this list."
Site contents [in Sep 2008]:
* Afganistan Old Photos; * Asian Historical Architecture; * Bond Photograph Library; * Cambodian Genocide Program - Photographs; * China: Exploring the Interior, 1903-1904; * Digital Himalaya Project; * Echoes of Freedom: South Asian Pioneers in California, 1899-1965; * Four Months of War, Shanghai 1937; * Himalayan Art Resources (HAR) - Photographic Archives; * Historic Camel Photos - China, Mongolia, India, Central Asia, Russia, Middle East; * Historical Photographs of China; * Historical Photos of Central Asia - Images of Life in Central Asia; * Indonesia independent - Photographs 1947-1953; * Japanese Old Photographs in Bakumatsu-Meiji Period; * Keagle Photograph Library; * Mahatma Gandhi Research and Media Service; * Micronesia Over the Years; * Moluccan History and Culture in Pictures; * Pakistan: Historic Karachi; * Photos of Tibet in the early 1940's; * Pictures from Tibet; * Pioneer Photography from the [19th c.] Dutch Indies; * RAWA Photo Gallery: Afghanistan from 1992-2008; * SouthEast Asian images & Texts; * Svadesh videsh - Asia, Pacific & Africa Collections; * The Cities/Buildings Database; * The Dutch East Indies in Photographs, 1860-1940; * The East Asian [Digital] Collection; * The French Institute of Pondichery (IFP) - Photo Archives; * The Gertrude Bell Project; * The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 - Materials from the Dana and Vera Reynolds Collection; * The Hawaii War Records Depository (HWRD) Photos; * The Hedda Morrison Photographs of China, 1933-1946; * The Islamic Gallery: Photos and Artwork; * The Nanking Atrocities (Online Documentary); * The Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection on Muslims in China; * The Virtual Museum of Cham Architecture, Vietnam; * Thomas H. Hahn Docu-Images - Contemporary Transformations of China; * Thomas, G.H - An American in China: 1936-1939; * Turkestanskii Al'bom (Photo Album of 19th Century Russian Turkistan); * Vanished Kingdoms: The Wulsin Photographs of Tibet, China, and Mongolia, 1921-1925; * [The Dutch East Indies in] Colonial World Fairs.