SRIFIAS Library
Open year round from 8:00 am-5:00 pm; closed weekends and holidays (see the Indiana University Academic Calendar)
Consisting of a general collection and several special collections, the SRIFIAS Library is one of North America's premier resources for teaching and research in the history, languages, literatures, geography, ethnographies, and religions of Central and Inner Asia. The SRIFIAS Library Catalog, comprising about 10,000 volumes, is available on line and can be accessed either at this site or through the general catalogue of the IU Library System. The Library also houses a number of current journals, audio tapes, maps, and slides.
The SRIFIAS Library also houses several special collections, including:
- The Central Asian Archives
- The Ilhan Başgöz Turkish Folklore Archive
- The Tibetan Collection
- The Eberhard Archive
- The Dudukalev Archive
- The David Straub Archive of Police Dossiers from Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution
- The Tajik Oral History Archive
The collections includes works in all major European languages as well as in Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Persian, Arabic, Tajik, Turkish, Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, Chaghatay, and other languages of historical and contemporary regional peoples.
While many rare and otherwise inaccessible publications are available, the collection's primary value lies in its assemblage, in a single convenient location, of all basic reference works, language textbooks, grammars, dictionaries, and important monographs relevant to Central and Inner Asian studies.
The SRIFIAS is a non-lending library. Its staff welcomes general and specialized reference queries, but cannot accept requests for duplication, scanning, mailing, etc. of materials, or requests to conduct research.
The SRIFIAS Library collections are complemented by the extensive resources of the Indiana University Libraries.
SRIFIAS Library
Main Collection and Central Asian Archives
The SRIFIAS Library houses more than 12,000 items, including books, manuscripts, monographs, and serials in a variety of formats such as print, microfilm, and digital, as well as compact discs, audiotapes, maps, and slides.
The SRIFIAS Library is a non-lending library. Researchers are welcome to use the Reading Room during normal hours and in accordance with Library policies.
The SRIFIAS Library on-line catalog is hosted by the Digital Library Program (DLP) of Indiana University.
The SRIFIAS Central Asian Archives
The Central Asian Archives is a special collection within the SRIFIAS Library that consists of two types of materials:
1) a collection of microfilms and photocopies (obtained primarily from libraries in Moscow and St. Petersburg) of out-of-print publications dealing with Central Asia, all of which were previously unavailable at Indiana University's Wells Library and most of which are quite rare in the United States in general;
2) a collection of microfilms of Persian, Turkic, and Arabic manuscripts containing historical, biographical, and geographical works on Islamic Central Asia, obtained from manuscript repositories in Western Europe, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and above all the former Soviet Union.
Items of type 1 above are included in our on-line library catalog. A printed hand-list of microfilmed manuscript holdings (type 2 above) is available for download and in the Library. The SRIFIAS and Indiana University's Digital Library Program (DLP) are collaborating on a project to provide on-line access to a range of digitized materials from the Central Asian Archives. These materials will be made available through this site when ready..
Turkish Folklore Archive
130 tapes of recordings made by İlhan Başgöz.
Tibetan Collection
A substantial number of published Tibetan texts and reprints as well as over 350 rare block-print volumes.
Eberhard Collection of Chinese Frontier Tribes
text coming soon
Dudakalev Archive
text coming soon
Xinjiang Police Dossiers from the Cultural Revolution
text coming soon
Digital Collection
With financial and technical support from the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center and the IU Digital Library Program, the SRIFIAS is conducting a major project to digitize and post on-line copies of the bulk of its Central Asian Archives of approximately 1,000 difficult-to-find texts. As of Fall 2009, we have completed the process for 150 texts, which researchers can find at <URL>.
In addition, the SRIFIAS is undertaking digitization of several other of its collections:
- The Eberhard Archive of Ethnographic Data from Imperial Chinese Sources
- The Dudakalev Archive of Early Twentieth-Century Photographs of Mongolia
- The David Straub Archive of Police Dossiers from Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution
- The Ilhan Başgöz Turkish Folklore Archive