About The Afghanistan Digital Library

Afghanistan’s legacy of publishing is in clear danger of disappearing. The earliest publications appearing in Afghanistan are extremely rare and, judging by their absence from library collections around the world, are to be found now almost exclusively in private collections, where public access is limited or non-existent. Decades of war in Afghanistan have further dispersed and destroyed holdings of books within the country itself.

The immediate objective of the Afghanistan Digital Library is to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan’s published cultural heritage. The project is collecting, cataloging, digitizing, and making available over the Internet as many Afghan publications from the period 1871–1930 as it is possible to identify and locate. In addition to books, this will eventually include all published serials, documents, pamphlets, and manuals. Phase 1 of the project, undertaken in 2005, has drawn materials from the collections of several private collectors as well as from the holdings of New York University Library and the British Library. Phase 2, undertaken in 2006, has trained a staff at the National Archives in Kabul in conservation and digitization and is engaged in the cataloging and digitization of materials held in various public and private collections inside Afghanistan. In time the project plans to carry the dissemination of Afghan publications through the period between 1931 and 1950. Providing universal availability to this broad historical span of Afghanistan’s published history, and in the process constructing a national bibliography for the country, the Afghanistan Digital Library will reconstruct an essential part of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.

The Afghanistan Digital Library is a project of New York University Libraries with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Reed Foundation, and the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation.

Project Sponsors

The Afghanistan Digital Library has been undertaken with the generous support of:

Searching the Afghanistan Digital Library

The Search feature of the Afghanistan Digital Library is still in a pilot phase; we are working to optimize searching for the transliterated text on this site. If your search retrieved no results, please browse the collection to see what we have available.

Related Sites

Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection: Digitizing the Collection

One of the largest collections of Afghanistan research materials in the world is housed at the Criss Library, University of Nebraska at Omaha. The primary focus of digitization in the Afghanistan Collection is on public access. Digitized materials are made available to the public through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Digital Commons site.

Preserving and Creating Access to Unique Afghan Records

Preserving and Creating Access to Unique Afghan Records is a collaborative project of University of Arizona Libraries and the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University. The collection contains information related to history, social, economic, and cultural heritage of Afghanistan in Pashto and Dari. Content is continuously updated with over 2,300 titles (about 236,000 pages) currently available (April 2012).

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Copyright Statement

All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.