Skip to Main Content

Southeast Asian Serials on Microfilm at the Library of Congress

This research guide lists periodicals, newspapers, and serials in Southeast Asian and other Asian languages (e.g., Burmese, Malay, Chinese) available in the Asian Reading Room and in European languages in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room.

Introduction

Gia Định báo. Cover of August, 1865 issue.
Gia Định báo. Cover of August, 1865 issue. Library of Congress Asian Division. View fuller bibliographic information about this title in the Library of Congress Online Catalog

The Southeast Asian collection in the Asian Reading Room contains over 525 newspapers, periodicals and other serials on microfilm in many Southeast Asian languages (e.g. Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese). The Southeast Asian microfilm serials collection is only a small fraction of all Southeast Asian serials held by the Asian Division, which number nearly 12,000 titles (as of October 2020). There are additional titles from the region in other Asian languages (e.g. Chinese, Tamil) that are accessible in the Asian Reading Room. Nearly 230 more newspapers from Southeast Asia in European languages can also be found in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, which provides access to current, unbound and microfilmed newspapers. Finally, historic Southeast Asian periodicals in European languages (in bound volumes) can be found in the Main Reading Room as part of the general collections.

Due to the Library's organization of its collections by language and considering the multilingual history of Southeast Asia, there is a need for a single resource across various languages and reading rooms of the Library. This guide presents a comprehensive view of Southeast Asian serials on microfilm, both at the Asian Reading Room and the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room.

While most of the titles in this guide are newspapers, there are several literary magazines and other serial publications. Some of these titles have additional holdings in print, which are discoverable in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. If you have questions about a particular title or other materials in the Southeast Asian collection, please contact Southeast Asia reference staff through the Asian Division's Ask-a-Librarian page.

Please also note this guide lists serials by title, place of publication and language, but does not include holdings records for individual titles. To ensure the most accurate and updated information is available to you, please follow the link provided to the record in the Online Public Access Catalog for holdings records for any title.

For information on how to search the Library of Congress Online Catalog for titles of serials in Southeast Asian languages, please see the "Romanization & Search Strategies" page, which is part of the Southeast Asian collection research guide.

Both the Asian Reading Room and the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room have microfilm readers ready to use.

About the Asian Division

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.