How the Annotated Bibliography Came About

Early select bibliographies compiled according to occasional need and circumstances
In the pre-electronic information or pre-internet age  when I wrote my first article on the literature,  “Singapore Writing in English: The Literary Tradition and Cultural Identity”, published in Essays on Literature and Society in Southeast Asia (1981), I had to provide an accompanying up to date  “Select Bibliography”  of the writing, the literature then being  new, little known and still developing.  In commissioned articles and book chapters subsequently published elsewhere, I similarly provided up to date bibliographies (sometimes specialized, such as women’s writing or the fiction to date) for the information of readers unfamiliar with and to generate interest in the literature. Thus began the compilation and annotation over the years that was to lead to the eventual publication of this Bibliography.

Need for bibliographies for study and research, catering to growing sense of national cultural identity
When in 1980 Nantah University merged with the University of Singapore to form the National University of Singapore (NUS) and both relocated to a new campus with enhanced library facilities at Kent Ridge, NUS Library marked the move with the creation of a Singapore Malaysia Collection which included literary works by Singaporeans, Malaysians, and expatriate writers set in the region.  Bibliographies soon became necessary to alert readers to the growing body of literature. As the National and NUS libraries’ holdings increased and interest in such ‘local’  writing  began to develop alongside a sense of national identity, the Reference Services of both libraries compiled between 1976 and 1994,  ad hoc select bibliographies of an assortment of “creative writing”, biographical works, children’s books, literary criticism and so on.  The growth of the relatively new field of Commonwealth Literature meshed well with a solidifying sense of identity both in the production and study of the literature.  Singapore and Malaysian poetry and fiction titles were added  to the NUS English Literature curriculum, even as  other English Departments in the  Commonwealth were featuring  the “New Literatures in English” of the former British colonies, including their own, in their curricula.

Annual bibliography in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature
To encourage and support this interest, the quarterly Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL) began to devote its fourth issue annually to the provision of comprehensive  country bibliographies of current ‘publications in the field’ which include both literary and other works in English and  in English translation related to the country.  As Singapore was once part of Malaysia, the two countries were initially represented in the JCL by a single joint bibliography.  But when this annual bibliography inexplicably ceased to appear from 1990 onwards, I took the initiative to fill the gap up to 1993.  Thereafter, with my colleague at NUS, Ismail Talib, we de-linked Singapore’s from Malaysia’s from 1994 by presenting Singapore’s as a bibliography in its own right.  Since 1998, Ismail Talib, has continued with the annual task of updating it. All these above- mentioned bibliographies both local and in the JCL were disparate, uncoordinated efforts by various hands, and mostly by librarians.  To facilitate study, search and research,  a single comprehensive, informative and reliable annotated bibliography of the literary works by a compiler intimate with the literature became necessary.

“A Preliminary Bibliography of Imaginative Literature in English of Singapore and Malaysia”
The JCL compilation was in effect also an updating and expansion of my existing annotated database of Singapore literature in English titles.  It happened that the then head of Reference Services at NUS Central Library, Manijeh Namazie who was responsible for building the Singapore Malaysia Collection,  had an unpublished  typescript which was a compilation of works  set in the region by mostly expatriate writers such as Conrad, Maugham, Burgess, etc., with a small minority of  works by Singaporean and Malayan/Malaysian writers, but up to date only till 1970.  I offered to collaborate with her to update and expand this into a more ambitious annotated bibliography of both ‘local’ and ‘expatriate’ literary titles and to eventually publish it, spending a short sabbatical at the British Library, to locate otherwise unavailable titles by expatriate writers, physically check, read  and annotate long out of print works set in the region by expatriate  writers since the nineteenth century.

Expanding and annotating “A Preliminary Bibliography“
In 1994, Gene Tan of the National Library having compiled Celebrations: Singapore Creative Writing in English for which I provided the Introduction, and both Miss Namazie’s retirement and  my moving to Nanyang Technological University (NTU) that year, too, to be Dean of Arts at the National Institute of Education, I obtained a  grant from NTU   to revive work on  this larger bibliographic project to identify and annotate old and new  titles. Choy Fatt Cheong, when a librarian with Reference Services at NUS (and now Head of NTU Library) had designed a basic software for us to use which had become outmoded.  Three of his then Temasek Polytechnic students helped me migrate the since enlarged database to the bibliographic software,  Pro-Cite.  With its greater number of fields, entry and annotation became quicker and more efficient.   None the less, annotation still proved most  time-consuming, needing meticulous attention to detail, not to mention the training of necessarily short-term student assistants.  Identification of and information about title and author to enable accurate, relevant, and up to date annotation must be done by browsing not only among library stacks but also in book shops (especially for self-published titles), reading book reviews, searching publishers’ catalogues, and so on. Eventually, my assistants and I had to abandon the time-consuming personal abstraction of the content of novels.   Having found that most back covers of paperbacks usually proved reliably informative, we resorted to quoting judiciously from these instead, as the aim was mainly to give readers some idea of the content.  Even so, for lack of time and assistance, there are titles still without abstracts; but this lack is in the process of being remedied now that the Bibliography is digital.

From “Preliminary Bibliography” of Malaysian, Singaporean and expatriate writings to “Annotated Bibliography” of  Singapore Literature in English
After twelve years in university administration, I was able to resume work in 2007 on that “preliminary bibliography” of expatriate and local literary works in English set in Malaya, Malaysia and Singapore, interrupted since 2004.  I then realised that the National Library’s Celebrations,  the last bibliography of “Singapore Creative Writing in English” had appeared some 14 years ago and was seriously outdated.  I  decided to extract from the “Preliminary Bibliography” all the Singapore literature entries, and propose to the National Library that we collaborate to update my existing 2004 database and publish an updated comprehensive annotated bibliography solely of Singapore literature in English.  I decided that unlike previous bibliographies, it will not be ‘select’ but will try to be as comprehensive and complete as possible. It will thus include any and every work in English  in the main literary genres by Singaporean writers published anywhere and appearing in any publication from periodicals to ephemera. Unlike previous bibliographies, it will be purely literary in content and unlike previous bibliographies there will be  no non-fiction.  It would be updated to 2007 for publication in 2008.

Publication and launch of the print Annotated Bibliography, and online version 2008-2013
The  280-page print  Annotated Bibliography co-published by the Singapore National Library and the Nanyang Technological University Centre of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences was launched at a public symposium,  “Seeking an Audience: Singapore Literature in English”, in November, 2008.   Till 2013, an online copy of the contents of the print version was placed on the National Library’s website and a link provided to it on NTU Library’s website as a resource for all users. The plan was to update it regularly, but in that form, this was not possible and not done.

Bibliography becomes first NTU Digital Project and first digital key to Singapore literature in English
In 2013, NTU Digital Projects was initiated by NTU Library with the aim of ‘facilitating the discovery and use of innovative research’ by NTU faculty through making it thus conveniently and instantly available to  the university community, a national and also global readership. The  Bibliography, being a growing database that would require continual updating, annotation and hence, expansion, would be an ideal “digital project”. Its contents were consequently migrated to this purpose-designed platform. Unlike the print Bibliography, and even the earlier online version, digitization enables the Bibliography to be updated, amended, and enlarged  immediately, continually and indefinitely, rendering it a dynamic, interactive tool with hugely expanded, multiple search possibilities – for instance, areas could be mapped and patterns discovered leading, perhaps,  to unanticipated insights and  fresh research. This new ‘digital key’ to the literature  was launched in October, 2013.