Wednesday, April 25, 2012

DOPA headmen magazine

Cover 10/1998
Some years ago, I posted about the Thesaphiban magazine published by the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA) as its internal magazine to reach all the various offices in a less formal way. Now by some random googling I have noticed that there is a second similar magazine, also published by DOPA but targeted to the lower admninistrative levels - the village and subdistrict headmen.

This magazine, titled "กำนัน ผู้ใหญ่บ้าน" (Subdistrict headman, Village headman) is also a monthly magazine, first published on December 5 1949. Sadly, it seems it is only available in paper copies, I haven't been able to see any downloadable PDFs of it. All the online information on it is rather well hidden on the DOPA website, and very outdated - from the starting page on the magazine one can only find the covers and table of contents of the years 1998 and 2002. But the magazine is still in print, just few days before I discovered the magazine, the Public Relation Department issued a short advert with the details on how to subscribe. Thus the magazine costs 216 Baht for one year, but to subscribe or get any further details one has to call a number within DOPA - funnily at the extension number 404.

There is not much else to find about this magazine on the web, the only other interesting thing are some scans of a 1957 issue, which is apparently for sale. Though probably one could find more old issues at the Chutachak weekend market - haven't been there for long time, and never browsed through the book and magazine part of the market. Though I probably won't be able to read and understand much, I would certainly love to get one (current) issue of this magazine (and the Thesaphiban magazine)...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for providing a link to some of the scanned images of the magazine.

It'd be great if all of those old local periodicals could be scanned, PDFed, and then provided online for research purposes. Though, that in itself might be quite a project to track them all down. :)

Andy said...

All old issues are for sure available in the Nation Library, however I have not much hope that there will be enough interest in them to do such a cost-intensive task. Or maybe it'd be something for Google Books? They did scan some periodicals as well already, though most things scanned by Google sadly is not available online due to copyright.