Newspapers and magazines are important mass media for exchanging ideas. History is often written as the narratives of kings, rulers, politicians, or political parties, and newspapers and magazines may offer an alternative narrative to that of official history. Qalam, which survived for twenty years, is a very valuable resource that contains a large quantity of information on the character of the region in a given period.

Qalam was published from 1950 until 1969. Many topics were discussed during this period, although only a part of the ideas that emerged were implemented after 1970. It would be useful to go through the arguments of the 1950s and 1960s in order to evaluate present-day Malaysia.

There are rich Jawi documents in Malaysia. However, they are often collected and stored differently by institutions; they are also not as easy to read as documents in Romanised Malay; and the whole character of a group of documents is difficult to grasp. By applying information technology, these problems may be solved and more Jawi documents will be utilised in research, education, and publications.

The Centre for Integrated Area Studies (CIAS) at Kyoto University seeks to assimilate information and to conduct research in integrated area studies, making scholarly resources and facilities available to national and international universities and other research institutions. CIAS’s focus on information resource sharing has advanced to system development and the release of a sharing platform, which has won the cooperation of area-studies research organizations on and beyond the campus. CIAS has been engaged in developing databases with different themes in many countries; for example, it has created databases on disaster management in Indonesia, religious practice in Thailand, social security in Peru, and Jawi documents in Malaysia.

On the digital archive of Jawi documents, the CIAS collaborated with Klasika Media of Malaysia to develop the database. CIAS has been engaged in creating a database of articles written in Malay or Indonesian, both in Romanised and in Jawi scripts. If they are written in Jawi, the articles are transcribed in Romanised script to help non-Muslim readers access them and to develop a database with a cross-searching system. Then database can be accessed at the website of CIAS (http://www.cias.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/) or that of Klasika Media (http://klasikamedia.akademijawi.my/).