This year’s Annual Meeting and Conference of the Southeast Asia Library Group for the first time took place in beautiful Passau in Lower Bavaria, Germany, on 26-28 June 2025. It was hosted by the Chair of Critical Development Studies – Southeast Asia at the University of Passau. We would like to express our sincere thanks to Prof Martina Padmanabhan, Dr Friederike Trotier and their team for the fantastic organisation and support, and for giving us such a lovely time during our stay in Bavaria.

Photo: Holger Warnk
This year we were happy to welcome physically and virtually participants from Austria, Cambodia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, the Philippines, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. In the afternoon of Thursday, 26 June, we started with a guided tour by David Gibis in the Jesuit Historical Library of Passau which holds fascinating collections of pre-19th century books, sculptures, globes, ethnographica and also a small Wunderkammer (curiosity cabinet) museum. In the afternoon Jana Igunma and Holger Warnk were given the opportunity to introduce the Southeast Asia Library Group in the research colloquium of Prof Padmanabhan. Their talk was entitled Bridging Borders: The Role of the Southeast Asia Library Group (SEALG) in Connecting Southeast Asian Collections with Global Communities and was attended by c. 30 lecturers and students at the University of Passau.

Friday morning started with a guided tour at Passau University’s Central Library by our colleague Hafsa Idrees who showed us the Southeast Asian collections, the closed stacks and the popular Central Library’s lounge. After the tour we started the paper presentations at 10:30 a.m. First, Martina Padmanabhan gave a welcome address and introduced to the audience the Chair of Critical Development Studies – Southeast Asia and its history. This was followed by the first presentation by Juliet Olivar, Candy May N. Schijf and John Louie Zabala from De La Salle University at Biñan City, Laguna, Philippines. Their paper Mapping voices: A scoping review and bibliometric analysis of Filipiniana oral histories highlighted the importance of oral history in the Philippines, in particular for research on migration and labour, identity and social movements or war and historical traumata. The next paper was presented by Cindy Nguyen from the University of California in Los Angeles, but joining us from fieldwork in Cambodia. Her talk on Bibliotactics: Libraries and the colonial public in Vietnam showed the importance of libraries in colonial times in French Indochina and their relationship to power as vehicles of colonial propaganda as one the most used state institutions.

The second presentation by Candy May N. Schijf on Bridging the digital divide: A self-assessment of digital equity in Philippine school libraries drew attention to often overlooked and under-researched collections: the school libraries. In her preliminary interviews with 47 school librarians, mainly but not exclusively from Luzon, she drew attention to the efforts of bridging the digital divide at school libraries and related policies, practices as well as problems of infrastructure and the lack of suitable digital materials in Philippine vernacular languages, in particular of Ilokano, Hiligaynon, Cebuano, Bikol, Waray and many others. The next speaker was Wimonsiri Hemtanon from Mahidol University International College in Bangkok. Her talk on Contested heritage and community access in Banglumpoo, Bangkok, Thailand highlighted aspects of tourism-driven development, engagement of residents and civil society in Bangkok’s oldest district, as well as problematics of documenting changes for future researchers. Friederike Trotier of University of Passau reflected in her talk Researching and teaching Southeast Asia at a German university: Role and expectation of library collections on her changing role as a library user when she was a former Passau student, and now as lecturer who has to introduce undergraduate students to academic literature with the aim to increase their interest in Southeast Asia.

This was followed by two papers on Shan collections from Burma located in the UK. The first was presented by Jotika Khur-Yearn from the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and explored What SOAS collections tell us about Shan Studies. Besides a few other places in the world, Shan Studies were carried out mainly at SOAS by European researchers of colonial and/or missionary backgrounds since the mid-19th century which explained the existence of several Shan manuscripts in SOAS Library. Maria Kekki from the British Library gave a talk about The Shan Chevening Fellowship at the British Library which allowed professional Shan poetry composer and reciter Myo Thant Linn (Sai Hlaing) to carry out research in the UK on Shan collections at the British Library and other organisations in the UK. The next presentation was by Stephanie Willi from ETH Zürich on their efforts of Decolonization of the collections and archives of ETH Zurich. This included identifying problematic areas, raising awareness and dealing with challenging terminology. She demonstrated processes from acquisition and cataloguing to presentation and archiving by giving examples from several collections in Zürich. Annabel Teh Gallop from the British Library in London analysed several 18th and 19th century Lists of ‘lost’ Malay manuscripts which included several Malay manuscripts deemed ‚lost‘ as their whereabouts are unknown. These lists came from VOC predicant George Werndly, Madras army officer Thomas John Newbold, Malay author, printer and translator Abdullah Munsyi, missionary Thomas Beighton and a certain ‘Inchi Mohamed’.
Ane Husstad-Nedberg from Oslo University Library in Norway spoke on A new collection? Status of the Southeast Asian manuscripts at the Oslo University Library. The existence of Southeast Asian manuscripts at Oslo came to many participants as a surprise since the University of Oslo never offered any program of Southeast Asian Studies. They were in the library’s catalogues for about 70 or more years and consist of 16 palm leaf and one paper manuscripts which were identified as Burmese (8), Cambodian (6), and the remaining in Thai and unidentified languages. The next paper by Cam Sharp Jones from the Visual Arts Department of the British Library introduced the audience to The Southeast Asian visual art collection of the British Library. Several collections were acquired or donated from well-known personalities like Thomas Stamford Raffles, Thomas Horsfield, William Marsden or Frederick Harrop and consists of paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, furniture, sculptures, weapons, textiles and other items. A special mention was made to the Doris Duke collection of items from Thailand and Myanmar.

The next two presentations focused on Southeast Asian library collections in Chinese and Indian languages. Virginia Shih from the University of California, Berkeley, spoke on Breathing new life into the Sinophone Southeast Asia Studies Collection at the University of California, Berkeley: Challenges and prospects to highlight the only Southeast Asian Studies collection in the USA with Chinese language expertise. The collections at Berkeley cover a wide range of topics on the Chinese of Southeast Asia while among the major challenges are the identification and acquisition of relevant materials which is particularly difficult in mainland Southeast Asian countries. Holger Warnk of J.W. Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany then presented his paper on Some notes on publishing and printing in South Asian languages in Malaysia and Singapore. He faced similar challenges in his search for Indian language publications which were mostly in Tamil, but focused also on periodicals in Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi and Bengali. More and more Indian publishers in Malaysia and Singapore have been closing down in the last decades, and there is a risk of overlooking the publications of these minority groups. The next presentation was by Pwint Phyu Maung, an MA student at SOAS who also completed an internship at the British Library. In her talk on Burmese illustrated manuscripts: The collections of the British Library she focused on Burmese folded manuscripts (parabaik) as representations of monarchical power, religious devotion, courtly traditions and as documents of significant historical narratives which were acquired by British envoys, missionaries or administrators. The last paper was presented by Sopheaktra Suon who is an MA student at SOAS and also completed an internship at the British Library. He spoke about Recent development in cataloguing Khmer manuscripts at the British Library. Of the 26 Khmer manuscripts on palm leaves, mulberry paper or Western paper found at the British Library he took a closer look at eleven manuscripts and was able to identify at least one female scribe. Further examples highlighted text from the Reamker epic and colophons in other manuscripts.

After the many fascinating paper presentations, the group met again for the SEALG Business Meeting. The minutes from the previous annual meeting were approved, further comments, suggestions or corrections should be sent to the SEALG Board. Then the reports on activities and initiatives carried out in the past twelve months were received from members and participating libraries. Jana Igunma presented the SEALG blog statistics from the past 12 months, and possible places and hosts for the next Annual SEALG Meeting in 2026 were discussed. For next year’s meeting – besides elections – a revision of the SEALG Constitution (headquarters, treasurer position etc.) shall be put on the agenda. The access to the website shall be automatically given to the Chair and Vice Chair of SEALG as currently only Jana Igunma has access as web-editor.
Finally, the issue of the SEALG Archive, currently stored in the offices of the British Library, was discussed. It was agreed that it should remain in the UK since SEALG was founded in the UK. Jotika Khur-Yearn agreed to enquire whether the SEALG Archive could be transferred to the Archive at SOAS London.
Report by Holger Warnk and Jana Igunma

