The Value of the Leiden University Library for Study of Indian Epigraphics
The Indian section of the Asian Library of Leiden University Consists of three main parts, namely library stock, virtual, and material ones. The forming of the library stock was initiated in 1925. At that time the Kern Institute was founded that existed till the beginning of the second decade of the 21  st  century. There were more than 60 thousand books and 150 periodicals in the Kern Institute library by mid-2000. Its yearly additions were up to not less than one thousand books. Annual Bibliography of Indian Archaeology (ABIA) began to be published about that time; It help to raise up substantially the Kern Institute’s international standing; In 1997 the ABIA Project was launched. The ABIA project is a global network of scholars co-operating on an annotated bibliographic database for publishers covering South and Southeast Asian art and archaeology; The database “ABIA South and Southeast Asian Art and Archaeology Index” is fully searchable and is freely accessible; Extracts from the database are also available in the form of printed bibliographies. The Larger and Small Leiden copper-plates of the 11  th  century are kept at the Academic Historical Museum of the University. In 2017, the Academic Historical Museum became part of Leiden University Libraries. Both copper-plates are of great interest for the historians; especially it may be said about the larger Leiden plate that was written on 21 plates, 5 of them were written in Sanskrit while the rest 16 plates were written in Tamil. So, it should be definitely admitted that Leiden University Libraries could be truly considered as one of the largest world collections on Indian archaeology and epigraphics.