Harsha Man Maharjan

Why do organisations take the initiative to prepare bibliographies? What can we learn from these initiations? Why is making bibliographies important for the advancement of the discipline? These are some questions being dealt here. This is a story of two bibliographies on Nepali media published by Asia Mass Communication Research and Information Centre (AMIC), Singapore in 1977 and Martin Chautari, Nepal in 2003.

Conference
AMIC was conceived by scholars and practitioners who returned to Asian countries in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s after completing their education in the US and European countries. Y. V. Lakhsmana Rao from India and Crispin C. Maslog from the Philippines were some of scholars to take the initiative. Both of them studied mass communication in the US. In 1969, a conference was organised where 26 mass communication experts were invited and the idea of the centre took a shape there. It was in 1971 that those people set up such a centre in Singapore through a grant of $500,000 from Friedrich- Ebert-Stiftung (FES). Then in September 1971, AMIC organised seminars in 11 Asian cities such as Manila, Tokyo, Seoul, and Bangkok. During those seminars, hundreds of communication practitioners and teachers attended.

In these seminars and other programmes, mass communication scholars may have realised that they did not know much about the research scene in Asian countries. They conceded that it was needed to map out the extant literature so that they could programme future research based on the survey of literature. With this realisation, AMIC planned a series of ten bibliographies. Mass Communication in Nepal: An Annotated Bibliography compiled by Narendra R. Panday was published as Asian Mass Communication Bibliography Series 7. By that time, AMIC had published bibliographies on Malaysia, India, Hong Kong and Macao, Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore. Later it also published bibliographies on Korea, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

Though the booklet had only 34 main pages, it reflects the plan of AMIC. As was envisioned, the entries reflect the multidisciplinary field of mass communication covering some areas such as agriculture, anthropology, community development economics, education, law, political science, population, public administration, sociology, social psychology, and urban studies. It also contains short notes on most of the entries.
How can we evaluate the importance of this bibliography? Given that the media research field was not flourishing at that time in Nepal and the MA in Journalism and Mass Communication started only in 200, which definitely has increased the volume of media research, the initiation to publish a bibliography in the 1970s was important and praiseworthy. We can assume that those who were interested in doing research on Nepali mass communication must have benefited from this bibliography.

In 2003, Martin Chautari, an academic NGO published Nepali Media Sandarbha Grantha (Nepali Media Bibliography), edited by Shekhar Parajulee, Pratyoush Onta, Krishna Adhikari, Komal Bhatta, and Devraj Humagain. Many entries from the AMIC bibliography were also included in it. It contains not only the information about books, reports, seminar papers, theses, but also pieces published in 13 dailies, 52 weeklies, and 75 magazines and journals. The bibliography contains entries under 31 headings and has the author index.

According to Shekhar Parajulee, the initiation of preparing the bibliography was taken to make sense of the avenues where further research was needed. Later, the group produced works on sociological and historical research on media organisations/media issues such as Radio Nepal, FM radios, televisions, magazines, media training, inclusive media, and radio network.

New knowledge
Both cases show the importance of making bibliography to advance the discipline of communication, media studies and journalism. One way to advance a discipline is to produce "new knowledge" and we can’t produce "new knowledge" without reviewing the past knowledge. New knowledge is not possible without engaging with other researchers. Scholars in AMIC and Martin Chautari worked on bibliographies as they were interested to know the existing literature and plan for further studies.

However, other organisations which are doing research on media in Nepal have not prepared such bibliographies in print or online. Other organisations can definitely work on bibliographies on the issues they are interested in. For example, no organisation has prepared a bibliography on the impact of the COVID-19 on Nepali media. Those organisations that are interested in the gender dimension of media can prepare a bibliography on this issue. It should not be forgotten that bibliography is the first step of any researchers to understand the extant literature. In fact, researchers should prepare bibliographies for themselves when they embark on their research to make sense of the field. They can decide later whether they should make these bibliographies public or not.
One reason other organisations don't produce bibliographies could be that they don't want to spend money by publishing them in print. But now bibliographies can be published online where it is easy to update them. That means they can be produced at a reasonable cost and updated time to time. One of the problems of bibliographies is that they are not updated from time to time. This happens as often the interests of researchers who have prepared bibliographies change in time. Preparing more bibliographies on print or online which are helpful for the research community is one way to advance the discipline in Nepal, too.

(Maharjan is a senior researcher at an academic NGO Martin Chautari and writes on issues related to media and technology. harsha.maharjan@gmail.com)