Introducing the Anthropological Index Online

The Anthropological Index Online is an online bibliographic index which catalogues the contents of anthropology journals in The Centre for Anthropology Library at the The British Museum (formerly the Museum of Mankind Library, incorporating the Royal Anthropological Institute Library) which receives periodicals in all branches of anthropology, from academic institutions and publishers around the world. 

Our purpose in this note is to introduce the index and to explain why, despite Google-related appearances, it is still and important and useful tool for researchers.

What it does

The AIO provides a searchable index to the contents of over 770 journals, published in more than 40 languages. The index staff provide English keywords for all entries so consistent searching is possible. Many of the journals indexed are catalogued only in the AIO so it provides unique access to some of the more obscure anthropology publications.

Why it is still necessary and useful?

Library catalogues (and online services such as Amazon) only catalogue book authors and journal titles, not the authors and titles of journal articles. In response to this various bibliographic indexes such as the Citation Indexes ( nowWeb of Science/Web of Knowledge), IBSS and the Anthropological Index were developed as paper publications in the days before the Internet. Although the main academic journals, such as JRAI and American Anthropologist, are now published electronically so their contents are searchable via services such as Google Scholar, many are not especially the journals from Eastern Europe and the Developing World which are among the strengths of the Anthropology Library holdings.

Conclusion

If you only want to follow the material being published in the main anthropology journals in the West you do not need AIO. If you are interested in scholarship and want to know, for example, what is the anthropological literature on a specific place or ethnic group  then the AIO is still important. Only AIO (and its peers) gives researchers access to literature published by other researchers outside the academic metropolis.

The online data is regularly updated, and other improvements are planned.

The data is © RAI and use is permitted for educational non-commercial purposes (including private study). Regular or heavy educational/academic use is licensed by the payment of a subscription. Commercial institutions wishing to use Anthropological Index Online are asked to contact the RAI to arrange access.

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Coverage

Some figures and charts showing the coverage of the Index.

History

The Anthropological Index Online has been made available with the financial support of the William Buller Fagg Charitable Trust and the practical support of CSAC at the University of Kent.

During 2000 and early 2001 a retrospective conversion was undertaken which has added some 100,000 records going back to 1957. These were originally published on paper as vols 1-32 of the Anthropological Index. As part of this work we have modified the existing data to enable searching by the language of the article.

New search pages went live in mid-August 2006. Data is now available with accented characters in UTF-8 encoding (unicode). This was undertaken as part of the GROK: Genealogical Relations of Knowledge project (which was funded by EPSRC and ESRC). 

The retrospective conversion was enabled by grants to the Royal Anthropological Institute from the Getty Foundation, ESRC (UK), the Mellon Trust, the Pilgrim Trust and the Marsh Christian Trust for which we are extremely grateful. The main work of the conversion was undertaken by the UK Higher Education Digitisation service (HEDS).

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David Zeitlyn, Max Carocci and Janet Bagg