Hartford Seminary Collection
at Pitts Theology Library
February 8, 2002
Recently I became better acquainted with the 220,000-volume Hartford
Seminary collection acquired in 1975 by Pitts Theology Library. I
thought it might be useful to share my impressions of it as a resource
for Asian Studies, because about 100,000 volumes of the collection
are not included in the online catalog and it appears that hundreds,
if not thousands, of those volumes are relevant to Asian Studies.
The volumes supported the Hartford Seminary's longstanding program
of training missionaries for work overseas, including East and South
Asia. The coverage is extremely broad; it includes church histories,
missiological essays, and language training materials as you might
expect, but also standard histories, studies of local religions, travelogues,
biographies, ethnographies, sociological studies, census data, gazetteers,
political treatises, folklore collections, archaeological studies
and other "antiquities," bibliographies, literature, and
manuscripts in the indigenous languages. Most items are in English;
many are in other European languages. Although most volumes date from
1800 to 1965, there are thousands of volumes published before 1800.
All of the volumes are listed by author, title, and subject in the
original Hartford card file located at Pitts. Many items are listed
under geographical subject headings like China, India, Bengal. Topical
headings include languages (e.g., Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit,
and Tibeto-Burman) and indigenous religions (e.g., Buddhism and Hinduism).
Personal headings include prominent missionaries (e.g., Alexander
Duff of India), as well as indigenous figures (e.g., Shankara, Ram
Mohun Roy).
All of the pamphlets and all of the items published before 1800 are
in the process of being added to the online catalog, but the process
may not be completed for a number of years and the rest of the material
will only be added to the online catalog later still.
You can look through the card file on your own and request retrieval
of items at the Pitts reference desk. Most of the materials not included
in EUCLID are in the storage library, but it only takes about a day
to retrieve them.
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