The University Library has departments specialised in the subject you study. They collect items in the original languages in the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies subject areas. You can reach out to subject librarians if you have questions:
Chinese Collection
Japanese and Korean Collection
Near and Middle Eastern Studies Collection
www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/near-and-middle-eastern-department
South Asian Studies Collection
www.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/departments/south-asian-tibetan-and-southeast-asian-department
Contact details of each department are available from their websites. If you have a purchase request for an item in the original languages, please fill in the online purchase form, which is available from the home page of this guide.
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Other Collections of Interest in Cambridge
There are many other libraries and collections in Cambridge which hold special print collections for your subject areas. These are:
We also have a number of archive collections. Please visit 'Archive' tab from the top to view the content.
We have three special collections, which you can find details about below. These collections are available to users on a 'Read-only' basis only.
Abrahams Collection
The Abrahams Collection contains items of interest to researchers in Hebrew studies. Notably there are rare editions of religious texts and commentaries printed in Italy and Eastern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of them rare editions. The majority of the publications are nineteenth-century books on Jewish history and religion, and textual and philosophical commentaries.
The Abrahams collection has been on permanent loan to the Faculty Library from Christ's College since 1953. Israel Abrahams (1858-1925) was a distinguished Rabbinics scholar, fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge and President of the Jewish Historical Society of England. The book collection, though mainly nineteenth century, contains many early and valuable European-printed works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on various aspects of Hebrew scholarship, medieval Jewish texts and Jewish history.
Lattimore Collection
The Lattimore Collection is the personal library of Owen Lattimore (1900-1989), the scholar and traveler in Mongolia. The collection is on permanent loan to the Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies Unit.
The collection contains books concerning Mongolia and Central Asia including publications in Mongolian, Russian and other central Asian Languages. The subject content includes language and dictionaries, history, geography, economic and political development, anthropology and travel. There are also book concerning arts and religion. This is a reference collection only and items may not be removed from the Faculty Library.
Half of the collection are publications from Russia, China and Mongolia. These monographs and journals are not catalogued and housed in the basement. As of December 2025, the basement items are not available to users.
The major strengths of the collection lie in the areas Mongolian history and culture and that of surrounding peoples such as Siberian, Tibetan and other central Asian peoples. The collection reflects the scholarly interests and enthusiasms of the original collector.
CMEIS Collection
The books collection of the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (formerly Middle East Centre) is shelved around the central reading area of the Library. The journals collection was amalgamated some years ago with the Middle Eastern collections of the Faculty Library. There is a separate CMEIS reading room on the ground floor of the Faculty for newspapers and ephemeral journals.
The collection was founded with the aim of covering aspects of the countries of the modern Middle East. This includes politics, economics, modern history and development which were never collected consistently by the Faculty Library which is predominantly based on classical and cultural studies. The collection contains publications in Arabic, Persian and Turkish as well as in English and European languages. It covers all countries of the Middle East and Islamic North Africa.
The collection was set up by Professor Arthur Arberry in 1960, originally in rooms in Pembroke College, with the aim of stimulating in the University at large interest in the subject of the Middle East in general and in its modern aspects in particular. Financial support was initially provided by Shell and by BP. The collection came to be regarded as one of the 'area study centres' established as a result of the Hayter report. These centres agreed to specialise in certain subjects or areas of the Middle East and the Cambridge Centre took on the responsibility for books on the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region. There has been little funding available over recent years and the collection has not been added to in a consistent way since about 1990.
The major strengths of the section lie aspects of the politics and economics of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf area in the twentieth century. There are many Russian publications included in the collection.
We also have rare books collection consists of volumes printed before 1850 which came to the Library mainly with the early collections. It contains volumes printed in England and continental Europe as well as many printed in the Middle East, India and East Asia. Many were collected by scholars of Asia and the Middle East connected with the Faculty or with Cambridge. Dictionaries, grammars, Bibles, descriptive works and books of travel and exploration are heavily represented, as are books on Arabic and Persian studies. We do not have a list for the collection, but rare books have 'R' in front of their classmarks, i.e. RA 3 14.