The Highland Institute Library

A Growing Repository for Highland Knowledge

 

The Highland Institute Library serves as a vital intellectual hub for our research community, offering access to a carefully curated and ever-expanding collection of physical and digital resources. Rooted in the Institute’s commitment to supporting high-quality research and training, the library plays a central role in sustaining the academic life of the PGCertR programme, Summer School, and other research initiatives.

Curated and maintained by our librarian, Ms. Khrieletuonuo Yhome, a graduate of the 2024 Internship Programme, the library provides access to a wide array of scholarly materials across the social sciences and humanities. Our collections grow dynamically in response to the evolving needs of students, visiting scholars, and our research staff. Texts are selected with a view to support active research projects, including those under MyCClimate, Ekologos, Earthkeepers, and the Nagaland Oral Literature Project, among others.

Areas of Strength

Our holdings reflect the Institute’s interdisciplinary ethos, with particular strengths in:

• Anthropology and Ethnography
  
• History and Historiography of Highland Asia
  
• Philosophy and Comparative Religion
  
• Archaeology and Material Culture
  
• Literature, Oral Traditions, and Narrative Studies
  
• Political Theory, Borderland Studies, and Indigenous Epistemologies
  

The Institute is also developing a Digital Catalogue using BookCat, providing enhanced accessibility to bibliographic records for both staff and students. This system will soon enable internal browsing of titles, metadata, and subject classifications, and eventually allow remote researchers to preview the collection.

Archival and Special Collections

In addition to contemporary scholarship, the library holds and is actively expanding a digital archival collection, including rare materials from the colonial period and ethnographic fieldwork records. Notable ongoing archival initiatives include:

• The Col. L.W.  Shakespear Collection
  
• The Ursula Graham Bower Archive
  
• Collaborative digitisation and documentation projects with partner institutions such as the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and the Humboldt Forum, Berlin
  

Through these efforts, the Highland Institute Library serves not only as a support system for academic work, but as a site for preservation, decolonial curation, and the development of indigenous knowledge archives.