(17 Apr 2024) From Library of Congress announcement:
The South Asian Digital Collection (SADC) is the new online home for the Library’s digitized books, serials, and manuscripts related to the histories and cultures of South Asian countries (i.e., Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). The creation of SADC will provide easy access to a variety of digitized materials held in various divisions at the Library of Congress, and it will lay the foundation for more South Asian digital projects in the years ahead.
For its public release, the SADC brings together 900 books from the 19th and 20th centuries, selected issues of a couple of serials (e.g., “Bengal Hurkaru”), and about a dozen manuscripts, including the Library’s 2,000-year-old Gandhara scroll and a 53-foot illustrated scroll of the Bhagavata Purana, an important Hindu sacred work. All items in this digital collection are freely accessible online, and many were scanned between 10 and 15 years ago as part of the Library’s ongoing digitization efforts. When browsing the collection, users can filter items in their search results according to date of publication, subject, and language (e.g., Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati, English, French). Many books in English have full-text searching, too.
Find out more here.
