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Spotted an error, or have a document worth adding? Every correction and every source makes the record stronger — and the official source is always right where we are wrong.
A catalogue compiled by hand from library records, publishers’ pages and the offices’ own websites, and what it cannot tell you.
219 books, chosen by hand: histories of the sultanates and of American and Philippine rule, the studies and reports behind the peace process, ethnographies of the Maranao, Maguindanaon, Tausug, Sama and Yakan, dictionaries and readers of their languages, the epics and folktales, and the memoirs and novels of the wars. The shelf started from a search of Open Library, the Internet Archive’s catalogue, for every title it holds under the Bangsamoro’s peoples, places and movements, which gave the publishers, years, page counts and ISBNs, and 107 of the covers. Titles it lacks were added from the publishers’ own lists and from the citations the books make of one another. Each summary is ours, written from the book, its publisher’s description, or the reviews.
What it cannot tell you: whether a book is good. The shelf holds the standard works and the obscure ones alike, colonial officers’ memoirs beside the histories written against them, and says what each is rather than what to think of it. Every book is about the Bangsamoro, its peoples or its places, or is the work of a Bangsamoro writer; books about Mindanao as a whole are left out unless the Bangsamoro is their subject, as are articles, theses and pamphlets. Writers born in the region or elsewhere in Mindanao are marked as such on their pages.
Each book is marked in print, free to read, out of print, or self-published, from its publisher’s page and the booksellers’ listings as of the date the shelf was last checked. 54 are free to read in full, from publishers who put the text online or from the Internet Archive’s scans of books out of copyright. A book marked in print links first to a shop that sells it, usually its publisher’s; an out-of-print book links to its record on Open Library, which shows the libraries holding it and, often, where used copies turn up. Prices change and shops sell out, so the links are a start, not a promise.
173 authors and 113 publishers. Where an author has a Wikipedia article, the life in brief is taken from its opening, under Wikipedia’s CC BY-SA licence, and linked; the rest, and every publisher’s note, are ours, written from the books’ own author notes and the institutions’ pages, and say no more than those do.
10 magazines, newsletters, journals and reports, found by reading every Bangsamoro Government ministry, office and agency website for a publications page, and the sites of the agencies and institutes around the government. Every issue links to the office’s own copy; none is stored here. An office that publishes on Facebook alone, or on paper alone, is missing, and so are issues an office has not put online.
A book we have missed, a cover, a better link, an author’s life: tell us. The catalogue is a set of plain files anyone can read and correct.