Interview with Index Islamicus Editor Gregor Schwarb
So I'm at the sellers library and I'm meeting with Gregor as well. And we lose the editor of the indexes landless. And we're talking today about the question of why should you still use a bibliography like indexes lawmakers in this day where you can also use search engines. So what would you is fall into that. I would say that the Bible goofy in specific subject areas is much more important today than it has been 20 years ago before we had this huge online platform and kind of mega aggregator services because today any student but even subject experts are overwhelmed with the quantity of information and the amount of text that you can actually search so a biography is first and foremost helping the student and the expert to you to get a direction towards and more more relevant publications and to bring a kind of a structure into a totally unstructured amount of of information our team indexing public graphical records for index Islamic rules we are experts in different subject areas within Islamic studies. So we have the background knowledge to assess what what is of good quality and what belongs to which section because the index is lawmakers consists of 70 formatic and geographical sections and so with our background knowledge. We know where an article belongs and this is not always obvious from the tide law from the abstract probably one of the the most negative developments in this area is their already existing. Anglocentric approach to to scholarly publications has even increased through these on a platform because most of them are based in the Anglophone world and so for us it is incredibly important to take or to display more prominently publications in other languages than English so we are covering basically all European languages we have the domain six languages which include Russian French German Spanish Italian and English but we also include minor languages you know like Dutch like Czech like Hungarian like Serbian and and what whatever we can get hold of we index as long as it meets the quality requirements we have there are many many examples where a scholar has basically no chance to come across a reference of an article in French or in in in German in some really marginal journals published by a university department or by even some non-governmental organization is it you small institutions they are nowhere you know indexed in in one of the big indexing services and that's why Index Islamic use is basically the only way for for students and subject experts to come across these publications.
We help them to to be visible and to be read.
We help them to to be visible and to be read.