Digital Kielhorn

[Timothy Lubin]

One other source of scanned books that I have not yet seen mentioned in
this thread is:
http://www.archive.org/details/texts 
 
(This is one of the segments of http://internet.archive.org , home of
the "WayBackMachine," which has been invoked a few times on this list,
e.g. to track down Indological pages from China that had been taken
down.)
 
I have been able to find quite a few volumes from such series as
Epigraphia Indica, CII, SII, Indian Antiquary, and the like.  Same
problems as with Google Books (sometimes defective scans, poor
cataloguing), and worse.  The works are identified only by a few words,
which are apt to be misspelled -- more than half the EI volumes
available are listed as 'Epigrahia Indica' -- so one needs to search
creatively.  Another problem, at least for me, has been that not all
volumes are available for download as pdf; many are in DjVu, which can
be viewed by streaming on-line but I have not found any way to download
those; others are available in html or txt format after OCR conversion,
and I need hardly say that they are perfectly useless.
 
All the same, I have picked up quite a number of valuable volumes, and
they are much easier to lug around digitally; the large heavy volumes
can stay in my office!
 
I would second the call for the creation of an Indologically oriented
repository of these digital or digitized books.  The ones I download, I
clean up as I use them (cropping, deleting blank pages, etc.).  If
people contributed usable, complete scans with accurate bibliodata it
would be a boon for all.
 
Tim
 
 
Timothy Lubin
Associate Professor, Department of Religion
Director, East Asian Studies Program
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, Virginia  USA

lubint at wlu.edu   |   http://home.wlu.edu/~lubint 

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