With the launch of the Afghan Serials Collection, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives hosts the largest single collection of digitized publications from Afghanistan. To date more than 850,000 pages have been digitized and are now available online. The collection includes over 400 publications from the 1960s through the 2000s, ranging from royalist to revolutionary and covering a wide range of topics from political movements to cultural life.
The Afghan Serials Collection is a major contribution to the preservation of Central Asian history, especially as its online presence increases the accessibility of this material for research. It originally began as a collection of under 30 titles, which were digitized and made available online in 2016. Later that year, the Library & Archives acquired the Wahdat Library Newspaper and Journal Collection, which included hundreds more titles.
The digital collection is now available to Stanford affiliates. Transcriptions have been machine-generated using optical character recognition (OCR) for material in English, Pashto, Farsi, and Arabic, making full text searches and machine translation possible. The digitization of the collection also includes robust descriptions and metadata for all the online records. The collection is a valuable resource for students, scholars, humanitarian organizations, and area experts seeking to understand recent Afghan history.
