The University of Pennsylvania Libraries have one of the most important and largest collections of research material pertaining to the study of South Asia in the United States of America.

Starting with the nineteenth century, when Sanskrit was first taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the Libraries have collected material for the study of South Asia.

W. Norman Brown was also responsible for helping to establish the well known PL 480 program which in its various permutations over the decades supplied us (and many other institutions) with literally hundreds of thousands of volumes from South Asia.

The Library of Congress still continues as a major vendor to supplement the activities of collecting all material including monographs, serials, film, and digital formats.

The American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) was founded by W. Norman Brown, and it operated out of the Van Pelt Library till it moved to its present location in Chicago.

The Libraries acquire current publications in the disciplines mentioned above as well as actively seek to collect retrospectively in areas of research interests.

The languages covered by the South Asia Collections include Sanskrit (Vedic and Classical), Prakrit, Pali, Hindi and Urdu, and has large holdings, with an emphasis on belles-lettres, folklore, history, and linguistics, in Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Punjabi, Persian, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Telugu.

The Libraries also acquire materials pertaining to the study of South Asia in English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and Russian.

These are materials acquired by various departments of the Penn Libraries that are housed in the Kislak Special Collections Center because of their unique, rare, or fragile nature.

[10] The Libraries also holds a series of manuscripts on 18th- and 19th-century East India politics collected by the historian Holden Furber (Professor, South Asia Studies, 1948 -1973).

The manuscript collections for South Asia are enriched by additional travel narratives, ships’ logs, letters, and material on the military history of the East India Company, including the sieges of Seringapatnam and Bharatpur.

There are also several other colonial items such as a letter from Wajid Ali Shah's secretary to the East India Company, early diaries of English officials and their wives in British India, and a series of 19th- and 20th-century photograph albums of Indian landscapes and city life, as well as rare prints and drawings of Indian scenes, buildings, and everyday life, offering scholars from diverse disciplines a unique perspective into South Asia.

There is also a valuable collection of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Judaica from India, some of which is housed in the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.

These materials include books in English, Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, and Marathi, and represent the Baghdadi, Bene-Israel and Cochin Jewish communities of India.

[12] Daily newspapers used to be received in the South Asia Reading Room from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but now are mostly available online.

A very important, but often underutilized, source of information for South Asia is the microform collection which is located on the first floor in the Van Pelt Library.

These are but a few of the thousands of titles available in our microformat collections, and till these resources are reprinted or republished online, this format remains unique and valuable.

Geographically, it covers the whole of undivided India as it was in the pre-colonial and colonial period, thereby including the countries now known as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Here is a list of some of the commonly used newspapers at the Penn Libraries: Audio and video collecting have changed dramatically since the internet has made access to such media material extremely easy.

There is no fixed policy on collecting audio or video from or about South Asia, but it is now largely dictated by student and research interests among the university community.

As of 2015, the languages most represented in the video collection by title are Hindi (1,258), Bengali (186), Kannada (162), Urdu (150), Tamil (127), Telugu (88), Marathi (42), Malayalam (40), and Pushto (40).

Dr. Allyn Miner led the first and only performing arts component attached to a South Asia Studies department in the United States.

Till the landscape of copyright regulations and reformatting is understood, and until issues of stability and reliability of media formats in South Asia are addressed, video and audio acquisitions continue to be ad hoc and driven by demand only.

The holdings of the South Asia Art Archive currently consist of around 115,000 black-and-white photographs (classified by period and region), site and museum indexes, and ca 4,000 color slides.

The seminar room for South Asian Studies is located in the Van Pelt Library, and has a small reference section containing approximately 2,500 titles.