Asiatica Association

It has just been published by the French Institute of Pondicherry a DVD-Rom study on biodiversity in Western Ghats, a world biodivesity hotspot. It is in English, Kannada and Malayalam and is titled BIOTIK: Biodiversity Informatics and Co-Operation in Taxonomy for Interactive Shared Knowledge Base.
Western Ghats v 1.0. A multimedia identification system of evergreen tree species of the Western Ghats, India, by B. R. Ramesh, N. Ayyappan, P. Grard, J. Prosperi, S. Aravajy, J-P. Pascal…[et al.]. Collection Ecologie n°46, IFP, 2010.

The book by Ropharat Aphijanyatham Perceptions of Borders and Human  Migration: The Human (In)Security of Shan Migrant Workers in Thailand (Irasec – Observatoire - Occasional Paper n°1, September 2009, 84 pp), is freely available from the IRASEC, the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia, and the Observatoire des Trafics Illegaux Transfontaliers dans la Sous-region du Mekong.

The National Mission for Manuscripts was established in February 2003, by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Government of India. The Mission seeks to unearth and preserve the vast manuscript wealth of India. The country possesses an estimate of five million manuscripts, probably the largest collection in the world, which constitute the 'memory' of India's history, heritage and thought. These manuscripts lie scattered across the country and beyond, in numerous institutions as well as private collections, often unattended and undocumented. The National Mission for Manuscripts aims to locate, document, preserve and render these accessible -- to connect India's past with its future, its memory with its aspirations. This is Kritisampada, the National Database of Manuscripts of India.

It is my pleasure to post info on a new resource, which has ben written by Dr. Marcus Bingenheimer, Director of the Library and Information Center at Dharma Drum Buddhist College in Taiwan:

Dharma Drum Buddhist College has published a new resource. Those of you doing research on Taiwanese history and religion might be interested in our database of Buddhist temples in Taiwan.

What you find at this website is an interface that lets you query the location of temples in various ways, get historical information about them and access an image database. Since part of the data is also referenced in time it is possible to construct queries such as: show which Buddhist temples existed in Taipei in 1900. Since we mostly cater to a Chinese-reading audience so far the interface is in Chinese only.

The Digital Library of the University of Delhi has put full texts of books (in pdf) online. Actually, it is not possible to know the name of the collections, and from the list of authors the library looks rather small; on the contrary, teh digital library lists 3872 subjects so far.

The London Missionary Society collection of Chinese books at the National Library of Australia is now accessible. The collection consists of 539 items and is mostly of printed books collected by the LMS missionaries in China in the late Qing period. The Qing or Manchu dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912.

The dictionary of the Sanskrit texts Buddhacarita, the Bodhicaryāvatāra, the Rāmāyaṇa and its verbal forms, and the cumulative dictionary of the Sāṃkhyakārikā, with (parts of) two commentaries, the Sāṃkhyakārikābhāṣya and the Sāṃkhyatattvakaumudī, all in PDF, are available here at the German site Rasavidyā, the first systematic study of the material culture of medieval Indian alchemy.

A small treasure is now digitally available, a collection of  656 files of books (in pdf format), dating from the 17th century till the present time, on the Aceh civilization, located on the northern part of the island of Sumatra (Indonesia). The books are written in Indonesian, Acehnese, English, Dutch and other European languages and are published locally or by European publishing houses.

The tsunami that struck Aceh on December 2004 destroyed important libraries in Banda Aceh. The Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden initiated a project that aimed to digitize the major part of the literature on Aceh kept in the KITLV Library. The Dutch Ministry of Education agreed to finance it.