The library of the Institut d'études indiennes - founded in 1927 on the initiative of Émile Senart, Alfred Foucher and Sylvain Lévi - houses a collection of more than 70 000 volumes of printed works, including 600 journal titles (40 in progress) and a selection of dictionaries, databases and online resources concerning the Indian world (Indianized Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka) : sanskrit texts, Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian border languages, Tamil texts, philology, linguistics, political and religious history of classical India, etc.
In addition, there are some 100 manuscripts, 50 works of art, scientific archives (S. Lévi, L. Renou, P. Reichert, G. Fussman, M. Biardeau, Ch. Bouy), a map library of some 2, ,700 maps (including almost complete coverage of the Indian peninsula at 1 : 50 000 and 1 : 250 000) and a photo library with over 40, ,000 images. With Salamandre, the Collège de France has launched a digitization program to make its heritage collections accessible to a wider public. The entire art collection, as well as part of the photo library, audiovisual archives and manuscripts from the Sylvain Lévi collection, are already available for consultation.
The library offers 58 seats, including three carrels and two rooms for group work in a reading room shared by the five Asian Worlds libraries.
In October 2022, the library was awarded the " CollEx-collectionsd'excellence " label by the Collex-Persée scientific interest group. This label identifies research-level holdings that are remarkable for their scope and originality, and enables the labeled library to be associated with national projects for mapping and digitizing holdings, or to participate in calls for projects involving researchers.
