While staff work is what allows researchers to conduct research, their presence in the Library is foundational to the creation of the culture at the Library. This blog is an abbreviated version of a longer virtual interview with Shantha Murthy, a librarian and cataloger working in the Middle East and South Asia Section (MESA) of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access (ABA) Unit, with a particular focus on serials (magazines, newspapers, etc.) from South and Southeast Asia.
Thomas Wilson Haskins, a young American legation official in Beijing, accompanied the U.S. Minister, William W. Rockhill on a journey to meet the 13th Dalai Lama in 1908. The recently digitized collection includes Haskins’ handwritten diary of the meeting, photographs of Wutai Shan and diplomatic life in Beijing in the early 1900s, and a transcript of an interview with Elizabeth Gowan Haskins Workman, his fiancée who had travelled to China to join him.
The Asian Division is now accepting applications for its Florence Tan Moeson Fellowship, which supports short-term research visits to the Asian Reading Room at the Library of Congress. This year’s application deadline is January 16, 2023.
The recently-cataloged Malay and Indonesian titles in the Franklin Book Program reflect the geopolitical and linguistic shifts in island Southeast Asia in the 1950s–1970s.
A photochrom (colorized image) of Varanasi, a map of Jain cosmology, portraits of a Hindu household on mica, and the Library’s ancient Gandhara scroll are featured in this blog with more South Asian highlights from Library of Congress social media.
The Library of Congress Asian Division received a newly donated memoir by a former prime minister of Laos. The memoir, never widely distributed, will be of interest to the scholarly community.
