Primary Sources: a starting place
- South Asia Open Archives (SAOA)Contains historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia, in English and other languages of the region. SAOA's collection currently contains hundreds of thousands of pages of India Office publications, books, journals, newspapers, census data, magazines, and documents, with particular focus on social & economic history, literature, women & gender, and caste & social structure.
- Digital South Asia LibraryIncludes dictionaries, colonial maps, gazetteers, images, Statistical Abstracts, and gramophone recordings (and more) dating back to the 19th century.
- Digitized Archival Material (guide)Starting places to look for digitized archival material.
- CRL: Center For Research Libraries This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and subject indexing)
This collection includes microfilm for foreign newspapers and foreign dissertations. You may borrow microfilm reels and other materials through Interlibrary Loan. - HathiTrust Digital Library This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and the full text)
HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and digitally accessible. A major source of digitized books and other documents. Some of the collection if available for free to all, and additional content is available to Carleton faculty, staff, and students. - DPLA: Digital Public Library of America This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and transcripts)
Aggregates millions of digital items from major libraries and collections across the country, including Carleton College.
- Internet archiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access to current and historical web content.
British Colonial Files
- AM Explorer This link opens in a new windowPrimary sources from the 15th-21st centuries, including the social sciences and humanities.
- Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980 This link opens in a new windowBritish government documents concerning politics, economic and industrial development, trade, migration, education, administration, language, aid, agriculture and irrigation, and media.
- South Asia Open Archives (SAOA)Contains historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia, in English and other languages of the region. SAOA's collection currently contains hundreds of thousands of pages of India Office publications, books, journals, newspapers, census data, magazines, and documents, with particular focus on social & economic history, literature, women & gender, and caste & social structure.
- Parliamentary Papers This link opens in a new window(Searches through full text and subject indexing)
Collection of House of Commons Papers, Command Papers, Bills, Reports of Committees and Commissioners, House of Lords, Public Petitions from 18th Century through today. - Confidential Print: Middle East, 1839-1969 This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and the full text)
A collection of documents generated by the UK Foreign and Colonial Offices in countries and regions of the Middle East including Afghanistan, Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Persia, Sudan, Suez Canal, Syria, and Turkey. Covers 1812 - 1969.
- British National Archive: DiscoveryContains finding aids about collections ranging from foreign & Commonwealth Office files to diaries. Most material is NOT digitized and must be accessed in person in the UK.
Colonial South Asia: Catalyst searches
Use these sample advanced subject searches to give you ideas:
Newspapers and Periodicals
- The Times of India via ProQuest Historical NewspapersContent from Bombay Times/Times of India, dating from 1838 to about 10 years ago.
- Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and the full text)
Search across newspapers and digitized collections of primary sources from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, including ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online, NCCO: Nineteenth Century Collections Online, The Making of the Modern World, The Times of London, The Illustrated London News, the Times Literary Supplement, The Economist, and many more. Covers 1604 - present (varying by source). - CRL Newspapers This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and subject indexing)
A collection including foreign newspapers on microfilm, on paper, and digital. Filmed material may be borrowed through Interlibrary Loan. - British Periodicals This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and some full text)
Search through hundreds of British periodicals from the late 17th century to the early 20th century, all available in full text. Also allows searching for cartoons, photographs, illustrations, and other images. Covers 1680 - 1930. - Readex AllSearch This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations and the full text)
Search across all of Carleton's Readex collections at once. Includes historical newspapers, government documents, books, ephemera, and the like.
- Jugantar and Amrita Bazar PatrikaThese two English-language newspapers were published in Calcutta in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and have been digitized by the British Library.
Images, Films, Oral Histories
- Centre of South Asian Studies: oral history collectionA collection of interviews conducted in the 1970s and 1980s with both Indian and British people describing their experiences of life in British India, the events leading up to independence in 1947 and the early years of independent India and Pakistan.
- SAADA: South Asian American Digital ArchiveA growing collection of images, letters, oral histories and other archival material about or from South Asian Americans. Most is from the early- to mid-20th century and is in english, and often includes information related to the history of South Asia.
- British Pathe Newsreels, 1896-197690,000 videos covering newsreel, sports footage, social history documentaries, entertainment and music stories from 1896 to 1976.
- BFI: India on Film [1899-1947]The British Film Institute released recently digitized films of colonial India on YouTube. Most are back and white silent recordings of city/village life, or events like weddings or royal processions.
- BFI: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Tibet (1899-1970)Playlist with 16 short digitized films of British people traveling across the countries.
- Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire [ca. 1897-1993](searches metadata, very few actual digitized films)
Search or browse through films depicting life in the British colonies. Of the films that are cataloged here, many have extensive critical notes written by scholars, and about a third are available to watch online.
Maps
- David Rumsey Historical Map Collection (browse)Includes maps from the 14th - 21st centuries, covering all parts of the glob in multiple levels of granularity. Many historical maps have been georeferenced.
- Historical Maps of Asia (Perry-Castañeda Map Library)Digitized historical maps of Asia (UT-Austin)
About South Asian spelling...
Words in South Asian languages can be transliterated several different ways when spelled using Roman characters, so try several ways of spelling people's names or other terms.
- Devanagari (Hindi/Sanskrit/etc) transliteration comparisonOver the years, the ways that languages like Hindi and Sanskrit have been transliterated have changed. When searching, always try "common misspellings"!
- Common Romanization errors in many South Asian languagesWhen searching, always try "common misspellings"!
- ALA-LC Romanization tablesThe official way that libraries will spell someone's name.
