Origins

This first ever annotated bibliography of the entire body of the literature in English of Singapore was begun in the 1970s. It grew with the literature from the 1980s to the 1990s, supported initially by funding from NUS and then NTU during the pre-digital days of paper records and onerous manual research and compilation. The resultant print edition, published in 2008, featured as an online ‘resource guide’ on the National Library’s website with a link on NTU Library’s website.  But being pre-digitally static, it could not be edited, updated and expanded. (For a detailed account, see How the Annotated Bibliography Came About)

Fortuitously in 2013, the Annotated Bibliography became the first of NTU Library’s Digital Projects which aim to make the research of NTU faculty instantly and conveniently available to  the university community, and to a national and global readership. It is also the first such digital bibliography of the entire body of a nation’s literature in an official language in Singapore, if not also in Southeast Asia.

Features

– It is a comprehensive, not a ‘select’ bibliography: Judgement and evaluation are left to the reader and posterity. The “Literature” in the bibliography’s title therefore means basically literature in the generic sense of writing in the main literary forms – novels, short stories, poems and plays in English published  by any Singaporean. It includes works which first appeared in periodicals, even school magazines, found in anthologies and (unusually) in ephemera such as programmes of readings (where poems by then young or unknown writers, originally found their way into print), and unpublished manuscripts deposited and catalogued in the National Library.

– It is thus both a comprehensive bibliography and archive of Singapore literature in English since its beginnings, each entry identified, classified and annotated.

– Uniquely, it informs users in which of Singapore’s major libraries each title may be found (or not) for borrowing or reading, by providing its respective library Call Numbers.

– As a current bibliography, it is continuously updated and continually expanded.

– It has multiple search possibilities serving the needs of the general reading public as well as specialised researchers such as academics, compilers of anthologies, and so on. The data and annotations are designed to enable intuitions to be confirmed, patterns discovered and mapped, and discoveries of hitherto unknown facts, leading, perhaps, to unanticipated insights and fruitful connections.

Being interactive and dynamic, it can be edited for errors, omissions and improved any time. We therefore welcome your comments and feedback to ensure accuracy and to improve user-experience. Or, email library@ntu.edu.sg  if you encounter problems with the search functionality.