Author: maznahz

TRACING AND ACCESSING ARABIC PERIODICALS:
AN OVERVIEW
Presentation by:
Balqis Suja’ & Maznah binti Zakaria
International Islamic University Malaysia Library

ABSTRACT
Arabic periodicals are mostly published in the Arab countries and are usually untraceable from the international indexing and abstracting services. This article presented a brief descriptive overview of the characteristics of Arabic periodicals and explores the existing bibliographical control tools as found in the literature. The discussion
encompasses issues on Arabic periodicals’ bibliographical access and physical access. The Internet was searched to identify available current contents lists, individual
indexes, collective indexes (general and specific), institutional indexes, and bibliographic databases (general and specific). The final part of the article includes a
review on Malaysian Union List of Serials and Katalog Induk Kebangsaan (Malaysian union catalogue), on whether retrieval using the descriptor terms will yield local
Arabic periodicals collection available in the database. The results showed the extent to which the available information on Arabic periodicals is helpful for local libraries facilitate Arabic periodicals reference.

INTRODUCTION
The issue of tracing and accessing Arabic periodicals is a matter of concern in ‘Middle Eastern librarianship’ but research interest on Arabic periodicals is seemingly minimal. Periodicals are important materials for area studies. It is essential to make Arabic periodicals bibliographically identifiable and its contents be made intellectually and physically accessible. Arabic periodicals mostly cover the area of Islamic studies, Arabic studies and humanities.
Previous researches on information seeking of the humanists suggested that this group of researchers relied more on formal bibliography and librarians in their scholarly information seeking. The existence of hundreds-to-thousands Arabic
periodicals in academic institutions outside the Arab countries suggests that the materials are significant for scholarly needs and is worth collecting for the sake of knowledge and culture. However, the slow progress of Arabic indexing services may hamper usage and reference services of the collection. This article aims at consolidating the bibliographical sources to Arabic periodicals as relevant means for bibliographic reference.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS
As manually selected, there are 65 indexes and bibliographies covering Arabic periodicals found on the Internet. Selection was made to avoid inclusion of bibliographical tools already overtaken by bigger works. This simple study also concluded a set of findings:
1. It is obvious that there is a very low hits of Arabic periodical directories found in the Malaysian union catalogue.
2. The search results from MyULIS is far from revealing the actual holdings of Arabic periodicals in Malaysian libraries.
3. The result seems to present researchers with limited choice of Arabic
periodicals.
4. From the list of identifiable bibliographic control tools, internationally, as well as locally, shows users do not have the privilege to any current
awareness services and abstracting services.
5. The printed bibliographical tools to Arabic periodicals are still useful and needed for retrospective tracing and identification of periodical titles and
coverage of topics.

Balqis Suja’
IIUM-CFS Branch Library
Petaling Jaya & Nilai

n=65

CONCLUSIONS
Generally, it can be concluded that users are not able to find out what Arabic periodicals have been acquired by Malaysian libraries. In the absence of Arabic indexing and abstracting services and the low proportion of Arabic periodical directories owned by Malaysian libraries, there is therefore a need for an
initiative to reflect the actual size of collection since Malaysia posses quite a large number of periodical titles. The national bibliographic control is in itself a form of quality assurance to enhance interaction between the user and the
information.

Maznah binti Zakaria
Cataloguing Section
International Islamic University Malaysia
Batu 8 Jalan Gombak
53100 Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA