The Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL), founded in 1994, exists to provide research materials and facilities for students of Tamil studies in a variety of fields spanning the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Library's main objectives are to preserve, catalog, and expand the collection of Roja Muthiah, who during his lifetime amassed one of the world's finest private libraries of Tamil publications.The Library's notable strengths are its holdings in classical and modern literature, literary criticism, medicine, cinema and the related culture of printed works (such as song books), folklore, material by and about women, religion and philosophy, and numerous publications of historical value. The collection is comprised of more than 100,000 volumes of books, journals, and newspapers. In addition there are rich holdings of oleolithographs from Ravi Varma's workshop, nearly 30,000 journal abstracts and indexes, an enormous collection of clippings, drama notices, wedding invitations, business and family correspondence, and palm leaf manuscripts. Most of the publications date from the later half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.
Located in Chennai (formerly Madras), RMRL was opened early in 1996 to research scholars working with Tamil language materials. Access to the Library's catalogs through a World Wide Web page on the internet has been available since 1995.
The University of Chicago launched a global effort to preserve Roja Muthiah's library.
First attention is focused on publications for historical inquiry, ancient and medieval literature, medical texts, performance literature, and folklore publications. Grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ford Foundation along with collaboration from the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine made possible the earliest descriptive and preservation efforts.
Preliminary electronic catalog records were created during 1995 for all the titles in the Library and the preservation microfilming facilities were in operation. To date, more than 15,100 volumes have been preserved on microfilm and the corresponding cataloging records enhanced with full descriptive data.
Map to RMRL
