Updated February 17h 2013
The Sejarah Melayu Library is perhaps the largest public on-line collection of books and other documents on the history of the Malay archipleago and its surrounding region. Consisting of nearly 3000 books, academic papers and articles in electronic PDF format, the library is divided into eight broad sections:
GENERAL includes miscellaneous books related to specific topics in the history of the Malay archipleago and its surrounding region; HISTORIES AND OTHER REFERENCES contain general histories, encyclopedias, geography texts and other types of references; TRAVELOGUE consists of books and accounts by various travellers, explorers and visitors to the Malay archipelago; LANGUAGE houses dictionaries, vocabularies, grammar and other texts related to the Malay language and related languages; FICTION has novels, fables, short stories and other fictional works set in or with links to the Malay archipelago; JOURNALS houses key scholarly journals related to Malay studies; PAPERS AND ARTICLES contains selected academic papers and journal articles on various aspects of Malay history and culture; and NEWS AND DISPATCHES contains selected news, dispatches, reports, articles and other short snippets from historical newspapers, chronicles, gazettes and other publications.
Click on the '+' symbol of the relevant section folder to expand the folder and view the list of books available. Then click on any of the book icons listed to view summary information on it and a download link.
To quickly search for book or article titles using your browser's in-built search facility, select 'List ALL Documents' in the library and use CTRL-F to search.
To view or download the book in question, left-click on the symbol to view the relevant PDF file, or right-click and 'Save As' to your computer. Please note that files vary in size from less than 1 MB to nearly 100 MB, so please check the size of the file in question before downloading. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read these books. You can download the latest version of Acrobat Reader at Adobe's website.