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
- Burmese Collection
- Cambodian Collection
- Chinese Collection
- Indonesian Collection
- Japanese Collection
- Korean Collection
- Thai Collection
- Vietnamese Collection
Regional Asian collections
- East Asian
- Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore
- South Asian (including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka)
- West Asian (including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and the countries of the Arabian Peninsula)
Formed Asian collections
The Library has acquired a number of important Western and Asian language formed collections from scholars and bibliophiles. These collections include:
- Australian Buddhist Library Collection
- Braga Collection (Portuguese in Asia)
- Claasz Collection (Sri Lanka)
- Coedes Collection (Indo-China)
- London Missionary Society Collection (China)
- Luce Collection (Burma)
- McLaren-Human Collection (Korea)
- Otley Beyer Collection (Philippines)
- Sakakibara Collection (Japan)
- Sang Ye Collection (China)
- Simon Collection (East Asia)
- Harold S. Williams Collection (Japan)
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.
