Asian Library

The Asian Library collects Asian vernacular materials in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, Persian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai. The unit's reading room also contains a collection of reference works and a selection of current periodicals on Asia in western languages.

The primary focus of the collections is on humanities and social sciences and is strong in the areas of linguistics, literature, history, philosophy and religion, cultures, and societies. The materials are easily accessible from the unit's reading room, which is adjacent to the portion of the central bookstacks containing the Asian collection.

The Asian collection currently contains approximately 300,000 volumes, including 180,000 in East Asian languages and 120,000 in South and West Asian languages. The East Asian collection currently ranks third in size in the Midwest and 14th in the nation.

• The Asian Library was the first U.S. library to receive the 500-volume facsimile of the 18th-century Chi-Tsao Hall edition of the Digest of the Great Encyclopedia of the Four Treasures, a compendium of classics, history, philosophy, and literature, compiled for Emperor Ch'ien-lung between 1774 and 1778.

• The Joseph K. Yamagiwa Collection, unique among Japanese rare-book collections in this country, contains 400 volumes of works related mainly to Japanese language, literature, and history. It includes many fine examples of manuscripts and printing from the eighth century to the present.

• The Asian Library owns a positive microfilm copy of the William Carey Library Collection's secular pamphlets related to India, East Indies, and China, dated 1600-1880 A.D.

• Other special collections include the Autographic Collection, the Shih-liang Chien Memorial Collection of Chinese works, the Japan Foundation Collection, the Illinois-Tamkang University Collection, the National Central Library Collection, and the Albert H. Lybyer Collection on the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the Near East.

The South Asian  and Middle Eastern division is one of the forty-two departmental libraries in the UIUC campus system. In 1979, it was consolidated with the Far Eastern Library to become an integral part of the Asian Library.

The Library's collection concentrates on South and West Asian vernacular materials and supporting reference material in English.  By providing vernacular and reference materials and service, the South and West Asian Library directly serves departments such as linguistics, Religious Studies and Comparative Literature. The English language material supports the research of other departments including history, music, art and architecture, political science and business.

While the vernacular materials are housed in the Asian Stacks, the reference collection in the reading room is the best starting place for research.  The reading room contains a variety of general and specialized bibliographies, abstracts, indexes, catalogs, Library of Congress Accession Lists, guides, directories, statistical Reports and Census materials, etc.  The reading room is also where you can find the language specialists who can assist you in using the collection.

Among its holdings, the South Asian and Middle Eastern divisions have a unique collection of transcriptions from palm-leaf manuscripts, published by the International Institute of Tamil Studies and rock-inscriptions manuscripts. It also contains literary works in their original language of Nobel laureates in literature like Rabindranath Tagore from India and Naquib Mahfouz from Egypt.