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This section of the guide features digital primary source materials from the Asian Division along with digital items and collections from the Library's other reading rooms and research centers. Links to digital items and collections are provided for further exploration.
The Library of Congress, like many other libraries, hosts some of its digital collections on the Internet Archive.
Links from the titles below will display bibliographic records in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links for the digitized versions in the Internet Archive are included in each catalog record.
Highlights of this collection include Kaviraj Shyamaldas’s four-volume Hindi historical work Viravinoda, mathematician Sudhakara Dvivedi’s Hindi-language works on integral calculus and differential calculus, William Carey’s 1814 work A Grammar of the Telinga Language, and Archibald Constable’s A Selection from the Illustrations Which Have Appeared in the Oudh Punch from 1877 to 1881.
In April 2000, the Library of Congress office in New Delhi launched the South Asian Literary Recordings Project (SALRP), a collection of freely accessible audio recordings of prominent South Asian poets, novelists, and playwrights from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Languages represented in this collection include Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. More than 800 mp3 recordings from 90 South Asian authors are accessible on the SALRP website.
The African and Middle Eastern Division's Persian Language Rare Materials digital collection contains more than 300 manuscripts and lithographs. This collection contains many items originating from India, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the regions under Ottoman rule, in addition to the native Persian speaking lands of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Items in this digital collection comprise many disciplines, but historical and literary works are dominant. A number of these items are exquisitely illuminated anthologies of poetry by classic and lesser known poets, written in fine calligraphic styles, and illustrated with miniatures. Included in this collection are many Persian manuscripts created in India during the late Mughal and early British colonial periods. There are also many lithographs published in Lucknow, Kanpur, and Mumbai (Bombay), among other South Asian locales. Researchers with questions about Persian materials from South Asia are encouraged to contact the African & Middle Eastern Division through Ask a Librarian. Below are some relevant highlights from the Library's Persian Language Rare Materials digital collection.
The Geography and Map Division's digitized cartographic collections include a number of maps of South Asia as a geographic region as well as maps of individual countries. Researchers with questions about maps pertaining to South Asia or South Asian countries are encouraged to contact specialists using Ask a Librarian. Below are some relevant highlights from the Library's map collections.
The Library's Open Access Books is a growing online collection of contemporary open access e-books. All of these books have been made available for download on the Library's website in keeping with the intent of their creators and publishers, who chose to publish these works under open access licenses to allow the broadest possible access and reuse.
Below is a representative sample of e-books in this online collection.
The Prints & Photographs Division's Online Catalog includes digitized and non-digitized materials in its collections. Please be advised that some digitized materials only display in full size onsite at the Library of Congress. Researchers with questions about prints and photographs pertaining to South Asia are encouraged to contact specialists using Ask a Librarian. Below are some relevant highlights from the Library's pictorial collections.
Chronicling America is the Library’s digital resource providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress. Chronicling America enables you to search a selection of American historic newspapers published from 1763-1963. This resource may prove fruitful for researchers focusing on the history of American understandings of South Asia. For example, the research guide Yoga: Topics in Chronicling America highlights newspaper articles that portrayed yoga as a controversial practice in the United States in the early twentieth century. Researchers with questions about Chronicling America materials should contact specialists using Ask a Librarian.