Faculty Library

The Collections

The Faculty Library contains around 70,000 monograph volumes, around 74 current journals and 1,600 DVDs. It is primarily an English (and European) language collection but there are many publications in the various Asian & Middle Eastern languages taught in the Faculty. These are Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew. The regional scope of the Library's collections includes China, Japan, Korea and Central Asia, the Indian sub-continent (but not South-East Asia), the Middle East (including publications on Islamic North Africa). The subject content includes the languages, literature, history, philosophy, art and archaeology of the above regions from earliest times to the present. In recent years there has been a growth in the coverage of aspects of the modern world within the same regional scope, especially literature, politics, sociology and economic conditions.

The collections are arranged on a regional basis and publications in Asian and Middle Eastern languages are not classified separately. The Library houses a number of special collections and there are also slides, videos and DVDs, photographs and maps. There is an archive collection of papers of scholars of Asia and the Middle East.

The Library is primarily a working collection for students but, because of its varied origins, it also contains a great deal of valuable material relevant to research students and local, national and international scholars.