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New Zealand Studies: A Guide to Bibliographic Resources

5. General guides

5. General guides

The analysis above has divided the field into monographs, serials (subdivided into newspapers, periodicals, and parliamentary papers) and theses. This section of the paper concludes with some general guides to all formats.

The father of the general guides is John Harris's Guide to New Zealand Reference Material and Other Sources of Information, 2nd edition 1950, with supplements in 1951 and 1957. Its child is Guide to Information Sources, a series of subject parts issued by the Library of Massey University. Eight volumes were issued between 1975 and 1982. In 1980, Clio Press issued as part 18 in its World Bibliographical Series, Ray Grover's volume on New Zealand. Of considerable value still is the New Zealand Library Association's A Bibliography of New Zealand Bibliographies (1967).

The literature of science has not been mentioned before. Suffice to say that it is more dense, and better organized, indexed and documented than that of the humanities. In 1980 the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research published the first volume of New Zealand Science Abstracts, produced from the Department's SIRIS database which aims to control all current New Zealand scientific literature. Modelled on the AGRIS and INIS systems, the Abstracts cover all New Zealand scientific and technical literature including papers, reports and books published in or about New Zealand, or published overseas by researchers in New Zealand. Published annually for 1980-82 it is now published quarterly with an annual cumulation.

The current legal literature is covered by J. F. Northey's Index to New Zealand Legal Writing. The second edition, 1982, covers books, theses, dissertations and articles 1954-1981.

For the beginning historical researcher G. A. Wood's A Guide for Students of New Zealand History (1973) is useful.

Literature is relatively well provided for with J. E. P. Thomson's New Zealand Literature to 1977: a Guide to Information Sources from Gale Research in 1980; the 'Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature' in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature since 1965; J. A. S. Burns's New Zealand Novels and Novelists 1861-1979 (1981); and on a much lesser scale Cuthbert's Scarecrow Press volume Index to Australian and New Zealand Poetry (1963). Smyth's Books and Pamphlets Relating to Culture page 15 and the Arts in New Zealand (1978) is useful if uneven.

Among the many other specialist bibliographies worthy of note are C. R. H. Taylor's A Bibliography of Publications on the New Zealand Maori and the Moriori of the Chatham Islands (1972), an updated version of a section of his earlier Pacific Bibliography (1965), Hargreaves's Annotated Bibliography of New Zealand Population (1972), and H. O. Roth's bibliographies on education, pacifism and trade unions.

The bibliographical arts are alive and well in New Zealand, and enumerative bibliography, fuelled by the enthusiasm of some two generations of library school students, is flourishing. The national bibliographical pulse can be felt with accuracy since 1962 when the first annual survey 'Bibliographical Work in Progress' was published in New Zealand Libraries. In 1977 the last survey appeared in New Zealand Libraries and in 1980 it was reborn as Bibliographical Work in New Zealand, an annual survey of all bibliographical work published or in progress in New Zealand, whether by individuals or institutions, issued as an annual volume from the Library of the University of Waikato.