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The South Asia Ephemera Collection consists of many themed collections on microfiche including materials such as pamphlets, booklets, newsletters, reports, and newspapers. Ephemeral materials tend to be printed on cheaper paper thus scanning these for microfiche ensures the longevity of the collection.
The collection is available in the Library’s Asian Reading Room. You may bring a personal USB storage device to save scans while using the reading room’s microform machines.
This is a thematic research guide that is part of a series of guides about the South Asian Ephemera Collection on Microfiche. The themes include: Art, Language, and Literature; Economy, Development, and Industry; Education and Research; Health, Science, and Technology; Religion; and Society and Culture. These guides will be released over time.
Each thematic research guide is divided into subject pages (such as Buddhism, Christianity, and SIkhism) organized by tabbed sub-collections and geographic location/place of publication where applicable. For example, under the Jainism page, there are four tabbed sections: Jainism (part 1), Jaina hymns (part 1), Jainism in India (parts 1-4), and Jaina temples, shrines, and monasteries (part 1). Each of the tabbed sections lists the records of multiple parts of a sub-collection (i.e. Jainism in India Part 1). A second example with a slightly different organization is the "Islam" page. There are four sections "Islam-South Asia", "Islam-Groups and their publications," etc. Under each section are tabbed parts such as "Ahmadiyya and their literature", "Ismailites and their literature", "Bangladesh", etc. Under each tab the various parts are listed.
For tabs that specify the location as "South Asia" or list no location, the sub-collection contains materials that were published in multiple countries in South Asia.
While bibliographic records do not have itemized descriptions of each collection, the majority of the sub-collections and their parts have an index accessible through the bibliographic record. The details provided in indexes vary greatly. Item information in each index may include title, author, publisher, language, publication location, subject, and date of creation. Most of the indexes are between 1 and 3 pages, while some are as long as 80 pages. Most indexes are searchable PDFs depending on the quality of the scan. Not all records have indexes due to the quality of scans or because one was not provided. For more information about the contents of these records without an index, please contact the South Asia reference librarians for more information.
A complete list of all South Asian Ephemera on Microfiche Indexes may be accessed through this link.
The materials in this collection were mostly collected by the acquisition librarians from the Library of Congress Overseas Offices in South Asian located in Islamabad, Pakistan and New Delhi, India. The origins of the older materials from the middle eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, before the opening of the Overseas Offices, are not known.
Links to titles of collections will retrieve fuller bibliographic information from the Library of Congress Online Catalog. If you are interested in a particular collection or part, please contact the South Asia reference librarians for more information through Ask-A-Librarian.
In addition to the South Asian Ephemera Collection on Microfiche, this research guide includes a page about the South Asia Pamphlet Collection.
The Asian Reading Room provides public access to more than 4 million items in approximately 200 languages and dialects from across Asia, including Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Thai, Tibetan, Urdu, Vietnamese, and many others. In the reading room, researchers can use the Asian Division’s collections of printed materials, microform, and databases and confer with reference librarians to answer research questions about the countries of East, South, and Southeast Asia.
