What we collect

Asian Collections

The National Library houses the largest and most actively developing research resource on Asia in Australia, with holdings of over half a million volumes. The history of these collections dates from the early 1950s when the Library began systematic acquisition from the region, with a continuing emphasis on modern Asia and the social sciences.

The priority in collecting about Asia in Western and Asian languages has been on East Asia, that is China and its periphery including Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as Japan and the Korean peninsula, and Southeast Asia, consisting of Burma, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. There are also significant English language collections relating to South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

Asian newspapers are listed in Overseas Newspaper Titles Collected.

Staff have published articles and reports on a range of Asian library topics.

Asian Language collections

Regional Asian collections

Formed Asian collections

The Library has acquired a number of important Western and Asian language formed collections from scholars and bibliophiles. These collections include:

Web archive collections

The Asian web archive collections feature websites selected by the Library for archiving and hosted on the Internet Archive - the American non-profit 'internet library'. Each collection consists of websites archived around a theme, for example the 2007 Thailand election or Islamic organisations in Indonesia.

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