LES SOURCES CONTEMPORAINES DU LAOS / - EFEO-Vientiane

Présentation / Presentation
and NGOs. Taking advantage of this delay, the data collection expanded to
include the listing of educational and university material, geographical maps,
film and musical recordings, propaganda-based documents and other
publications falling under diverse categories like gastronomy, travel guides,
speleology.
In the course of this undertaking ; the scale and distribution of which was
quite unimagined beforehand ; I had the opportunity first and foremost to
consult and carry out research in more than 100 libraries, documentation
centres, newspaper and publishing houses in about 20 countries in Asia,
Europe, Russia and North America. I am also greatly indebted to the
following persons for their help in this enterprise - Khamla Sisomphou for
works published in Laos and Thailand ; NguyÔn Hµo Hïng for works
published in Viêt-Nam ; Mak Phoeun and Khing Hoc Dy (my colleagues at
the CNRS) for their collaboration on the Khmer publications ; Martin Rathie
and Xuixing You for the missing works published in Australia and United
States ; Yang Baoyun and 4 of his (1 st class) honours students : (Fu Yuan,
Zhang Jie, Zhu Yuxuan et Wang Xiaoming), for the inventory of documents
in China. All collected works have subsequently been verified and
complemented with the cross-examination of references from 244 existing
bibliographies, as well as upon consultation of some 50 data bases on the
Internet. And lastly, this in-depth research was made possible from the
verification of bibliographic data culled from some 1000 volumes/books,
articles, theses, as well as the cooperation of about 100 researchers from
different countries, who have kindly furnished me lists of their works and
who generously let me withdraw information from their research sources.
There are currently about 14,700 items in this volume and 400 works
featuring individualized reviews have been given special mention. However,
if all the published works on the Indochinese peninsula and South-East
Asian region containing references on Laos, or magazine articles (foreign or
local) containing miscellaneous trivia, or the itemization of so-called local
“light” music had been included, this would probably be a much more
voluminous book. Therefore, it is my intention to partly compensate for this
inadequacy by electronically recording the 3000 of other items amassed and
subsequently placing this work on a Website where it can be regularly
updated. Specialists everywhere in all fields of study would then be able to
access it and fill in whatever omissions there may be ; thereby participating
in the enrichment of this proposed Website.
From the formal viewpoint, the presentation of this work is identical to
that of the two previous ones by Pierre-Bernard Lafont. The works are listed
in continuous enumeration and authors’ names are placed in alphabetical
order under the headings. We don’t make any exception of the authors,
whose family surnames are listed first, it is customary for individual Lao,
and Thai and names to be listed before family surnames. The transcription of
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