| Preface
After nearly two years' labor, in collecting, reading, arranging, and classifying the material included in this work, I am at last able to publish the following bibliographical study. This work has been driven by two main considerations: First, the need to fill one of the major gaps in the world of bibliographies, namely, a general annotated bibliography on the Kurds and Kurdistan. Second, to assist researchers to locate their needed information on the Kurds in a more efficient way.
In the last few years, the Kurdish question has taken on more prominence in Middle Eastern politics, and attracted the interest of media, the academic community as well as governmental and non-governmental organizations. The years 1991 and 1992 are (and will be) remembered by all students of Kurdish topics as the ones during which they were swamped by the press and academic departments to supply answers to everything that needed to be known about the Kurds--and quickly.
Lacking comprehensive bibliographical studies, the Kurdologists have had little choice but to go to the Internet or DIALOG to search for material to complete their work, spending hundreds of hours and dollars in the process. They had to go over many databases, containing plenty of repetitious and misleading records. They have needed to survey all of the outputs for the needed material and yet with no definite positive end result. Soon also, they would discover that almost none of the databases cover materials published before the mid-1960s which certainly include many valuable works. Therefore, a manual search through a well-classified, annotated bibliography seemed to be more fruitful and presented a more economic and rapid method of communication research and retrieval of information. Had there been an up-to-date, multidisciplinary, annotated bibliography of the Kurds and Kurdistan, the researcher's task would have been much easier, less expensive and more rewarding. In short, no matter how much the Information Science field develops, we will always need to rely on printed bibliographies. This is due to their accuracy, their savings in time and money, and their multi-disciplinary character.
Books, articles, chapters in edited works, doctoral dissertations, and reports on the Kurds and Kurdistan are many, but scattered and often untraceable when needed. It was this situation which motivated me to consider compiling an annotated bibliography on the subject and make it available to the public, students, academicians, researchers, policy-makers, and the press. The fact that very few works of this kind are now available in English was another important reason.
The first real bibliography on the Kurds and Kurdistan was published in 1968 by the International Society for Kurdistan (ISK's Kurdish Bibliography). This impressive work came out in two volumes and was edited by Silvio van Rooy and Kees Tamboer (Amsterdam: International Society for Kurdistan, 1968). The work is exhaustive and includes 9,350 entries in more than twenty languages and on all subjects that had been published before June 30, 1966. The second bibliography on the Kurds in English was by Wolfgang Behn (The Kurds in Iran: A Selected and Annotated Bibliography. [2nd ed.] London: Mansell, 1977. The first edition was published in 1969 under the title The Kurds, a Minority in Iran). This bibliography, compiled chiefly from holdings of the Islamic Union Catalogue in Germany, lists 275 entries in more than four languages, some of which are specialized studies of Iran. It was intended to supplement the ISK's bibliography for the years 1966-1975, yet, as the title reflects, the work is almost exclusively limited to the Iranian sector of Kurdistan. Finally, in anticipation of the rising importance of the Kurdish question in the Middle East, Elizabeth E. Lytle produced a small work entitled A Bibliography of the Kurds, Kurdistan, and the Kurdish Question (Monticello, 111.: Council of Planning Librarians, 1977, 16 p. Exchange bibliography-Council of Planning Librarians; 1301). She says in the introduction that her bibliography cites works that were published between 1837 and 1975, divided into two sections: One is concerned with the Kurds and Kurdistan in general, while the other is limited to the historical and political aspects of the Kurdish question. This small work, however, is merely a list of records (216) written in nine different languages with no subject headings or annotations... |
