Dear Indology colleagues,

 

I’m writing with some belated updates from the Library of Congress (LC) in Washington, D.C. with regard to our South Asian manuscript digitization and cataloging. Good news ahead!

 

Digitization: We just finished a one-off project to digitize the five volumes Albrecht Weber Manuscript #54: Beiträge zum Petersburger Wörterbuch. These volumes are Weber’s contributions to Sanskrit vocabulary, and only some of the entries made it into Otto Böhtlingk and Rudolf Roth’s Sanskrit dictionary. This manuscript joins two prior Weber digitized manuscripts: Anupadam and Anupadasûtram : Nidânasûtra.

 

These manuscripts are part of our South Asian Digital Collection, which has about 1,300 items for far. Most of this digital collection reflects LC’s general digitization output over the last 15-20 years, so there are books in English, German, French, and South Asian languages. Other highlights include LC’s Gandhara scroll, Mahatma Gandhi’s “A Common Platform” draft, several Urdu masnavis, and the Hindi and Urdu editions of the “Hindostan” camp newspaper for prisoners held in Germany during World War 1. All items are fully open access.

 

The South Asian Literary Recordings Project—an open access collection of 100+ audio recordings of prominent authors, poets, and playwrights—has moved to a new presentation on the LC website. It has added 20 new recordings of Nepali, Newari, and Maithili authors from Nepal from 2024 and 2025.

 

Finally – and perhaps most exciting – LC recently completed a Tibetan and Sanskrit rare material cataloging project that fully catalogued nearly all of our Sanskrit rare books and manuscripts. The output is the expansion of our South Asian Manuscripts at the Library of Congress research guide with detailed pages on our full manuscript collection, including the Crosby Khotan Fragments, the Princely State Papers Collection, and the Albrecht Weber Collection’s Sanskrit manuscripts. Special note: See the page “Other South Asian manuscripts” for many titles that are not part of a named collection. That page also includes some notes on our uncatalogued manuscripts in languages like Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Sinhala.

 

Please feel welcome to reach out to me 1:1 over email with any questions, using my LC email: jloa@loc.gov.

 

All best,

 

Jon