South Asia Resources
Beyond Books
By Philip McEldowney, Nawang Thokmey, and Rina V. Williams
Library materials, cataloging, and access for Fall 2004
at the University of Virginia
Books, Quran, District Gazetteers, Kanjur and Tanjur

Here are three books, added to the University of Virginia library, which might be of interest:
**The Oxford India Ghalib : life, letters, and ghazals / edited by Ralph Russell. New Delhi ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0195660374 Description: viii, 572 p. : port. ; 23 cm. Call number: PK2198 .G4 A29 2003
**The Picador book of modern Indian literature / edited by Amit Chaudhuri. London: Picador, 2001. ISBN: 0330343637. Description: xxiv, 638 p. ; 24 cm. Call number: PR9494.9 .P53 2001
**The Oriental rhetoric / Hamid Hasan Qadri. New Delhi : obtainable from Maktaba Jamia, 2003.268 p. 22cm. Call number: PK2167 . Q33 2003

Urdu translation of the Quran. The library is in the process of purchasing a rare book, an Urdu translation of the Quran, published in the first years of the twentieth century, which Mehr Farooqi has obtained a copy and is using for her research about the various translations of the Quran.

Alderman Library Cataloging District Gazetteers. Reference librarian Sajjad Yusuf organized a committee for the cataloging of South Asia microfilm materials and under his leadership the project has moved forward. With the support of the Acting Director of Cataloging Erin Stalberg, Cataloging Coordinator K. Suthar has begun the detailed task of individually cataloging the Library's microfiche collection of the 1221 District Gazetteers. Richard Barnett has contributed to the project by providing a work-study student under K. Suthar's supervision, and K. Suthar consults with library selector Philip McEldowney and updates him on the progress of the project.

The Gazetteers were compiled by British colonial administrators in India in each district and sub-division, and included the details about the region that the administrative officer could collect and record. Recorded in English, they included geographic and demographic particulars as well as the historical background of the region. In addition, they recorded any notable events in a region, such as riots, famines, or natural disasters. The Gazetteers were mainly published in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, and are the basis for revised and updated District Gazetteers published from the 1950s on. Today, the Gazetteers provide an invaluable and often unique source of historical information about colonial India at a regional level-with the caveat, of course, that such knowledge was filtered through the eyes and ears of British colonial administrators.

Previously, the Gazetteers were listed in VIRGO (Alderman's online library catalogue) under a single entry: District Gazetteers of India. Under this entry, the Gazetteers could not be individually searched by district name and dates. The eventual goal is to have them catalogued by the name of the district. For about one-third of these districts, especially the Princely States and Burma, there are no established "authority" records and this process involves several stages: detailed searching and listing of the area by exact geographic terminology, sending it to the Library of Congress for approval and revision, and contributing the new authority recrod to the world-wide Online Computer Library Center's (OCLC) data base of more than 57 million records. More records will continue to be added, but already, researchers may search for a particular Gazetteer in VIRGO by "District gazetteers of (district name)" (Try, for example, Gaya.) One may see all the records cataloged so far by searching "District gazetters of India." The project was begun in the fall of 2004 and is scheduled to be completed within a year's time.

14 different editions of the Tibetan Buddhist Kanjur (bka' 'gyur) and Tanjur (Bstan 'gyur) identified. Since October 2003 to middle of September 2004, I (Nawang Thokmey) was able to spend two hours every week in the Tibetan collection especially with the different editions of Kanjur and Tanjur; how to use these editions and catalogues. So far I have identified that we have fourteen different editions of Kanjur and Tanjur in our Tibetan collection in Alderman Library; all these are in different formats in book (4), pecha (5), and microfiche (4), and C.D (1). You can find the detailed listing at the Library's Tibetan resources website or at this URL:
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/area-studies/Tibet/reference/kanjurtanjurlist.html


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South Asia Resources

Webber Philip McEldowney
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