About the archive

Apakabar and John A. MacDougall

John A. MacDougall ran Indonesia Publications, a small press and news service on Indonesia, from 1984 to 2004. In October 1990 he opened apakabar, a moderated conference on the Institute for Global Communications network, and from it built a family of moderated, bilingual lists that he edited until February 2002. They reached, by his own estimate, some 250,000 readers in 96 countries. His biography speaks of about 175,000 documents across all the lists; the main database, hosted by Hamline University and later by Ohio University Library, held 137,146 messages by the count of its own folder listings. He died in Maryland in May 2023.

For readers inside Indonesia, apakabar was one of the few places where banned magazines, underground bulletins, NGO statements and foreign reporting could be read side by side, and where Indonesians could argue in public about their own government. The original sites are offline. This archive rebuilds as much of the list as the Internet Archive preserved.

Terms of use

Reading-room access is free for research and teaching. Most messages repost articles that remain under copyright, and many name private people. Readers agree to use the texts for research, to quote within fair use, to cite the archive, and not to republish or redistribute full texts. Messages that may name survivors of sexual violence or private people are restricted to approved researchers.

Corrections and takedown

Authors, publishers and people named in the messages can ask for a correction, for a message to be restricted, or for its removal. Requests are answered within 30 days. Write to nath@logosid.app, giving the message ID.

Archive built October 2026 · 140,833 messages · software: a single Rust program (ingest, analysis, web server) with SQLite full-text search.