Objectives and Significance of this Bibliography

The principal aim of this Bibliography is to compile all available, useful information and resource lists about Singapore's Malay/Muslim community into one document. This will enable anyone who are keen to know about the different aspects of the community, easy access to the compilation. Like other ethnic Singaporeans living in this global city-state, Malays/ Muslims are also experiencing a rapid transformation in their lives — educationally, politically, economically, culturally and socially. It is thus important that these changes be captured and documented so that the huge reservoir of information about the various facets of their life can be preserved and made available to anyone interested, be they serious researchers and academics, or the general public.

This realization to scholastically preserve and document a bibliography about the Republic's Malay/Muslim community (which did not exist before) led to our formation of a Working Committee in the early 1990s. We met and deliberated for many months as to how best to go about researching and compiling such a bibliography. The result was the successful publication of the Singapore Malay/Muslim Community, 1819–1994: A Bibliography in 1995, by the National University Singapore (NUS).

Since then, many new materials about the community have been produced, reflecting the developments, achievements and challenges faced by the community during the last two decades or so. Hence, this latest academic enterprise by the present Editors and Compilers, the majority of whom are senior librarians who have served the national and university libraries in this Republic for many years, and a senior academic with NUS who initiated the earlier 1995 project. The objective this time around, however, was to produce a bibliography that would not only merely update the previous publication by accommodating these new materials, but also collate and expand its scope and coverage as exhaustively as possible to encompass many different sources (print or non-print materials), such as microforms, documentaries, electronic resources and other media forms. After much painstaking, three-year effort, we now see the publication of this new Bibliography — Singapore Malay/Muslim Community, 1819–2015: A Bibliography — which we believe (humbly!) to be the one and only comprehensive bibliography of its kind available anywhere.