This Mountains of Central Asia Digital Dataset (MCADD) consists of a collection of books, journals and maps related broadly to the Himalayas and its outlying attached ranges including the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams, the Pamirs, the Tian Shan and the Kuen Lun as well as the Tibetan highlands and the Tarim basin. These materials are housed in this site, and are freely available for personal non-commercial use and downloading.

Some of this material was originally downloaded from the Google Books website, but often this material from Google has been augmented by the addition of maps and other oversize materials that were excluded when the original Google scans were done and/or the addition of missing pages. For example, the Google scans of the 50 volumes of the Royal Geographical Society Journal, published between 1830 and 1880 do not include any of the oversize maps—these maps have all now been scanned and some 450 maps added in their proper location to each of the journal volume pdf files on the PAHAR website.

Various aids to searching specific topics, such as indexes of articles related to the MCADD geographic area (Himalaya, Tibet and Central Asia) have also been prepared for the more prolific journals, such as those of the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Central Asian Society, and the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

The MCADD collection also includes much material not available elsewhere on the internet. These items were scanned directly from paper text material by PAHAR and added to the collection as pdf or jpg files. An effort has been made to search out rare and difficult-to-obtain materials, scan them, and include them in the dataset when possible. The map collection has been assembled from multiple sources, both digital and paper. Individual maps may exist in two locations in the MCADD collection—as a separate map with its own file name, and as a page in a book or journal publication. Large size maps may open in a pdf reader showing only a small size map without detail, but by zooming in the full details of the map will be revealed.

The MCADD collection is organized into five broad categories of materials—

1.Books

2.Journals

3.Maps

4.Old Photos

5.Projects

Within each of these categories the collection is broken down further into geographical areas broadly defined as countries or subcontinents. In each of these geographic categories the files are listed in chronological order by date of original publication. Each file name consists of the year of publication, the title of the item (abbreviated where necessary), and, when applicable, the last name of the author. Thus it is possible to search the database list of filenames by author, by title, or by date of publication.

All the text files have been analyzed by optical character recognition (OCR) using Adobe Acrobat, to make them word “searchable.” A letter “s” has been added at the end of each searchable file name to indicate the searchable character of the file. A reader who has downloaded a group of files from the MCADD dataset should be able to search individual and/or groups of files using Adobe Acrobat and find each mention of individual words or phrases.

The MCADD collection is a ‘work in progress’, and hopefully will always remain so. New items are regularly being added to the collection as they become available. The What’s New page lists the date of major additions to the collection, and provides a means to quickly identify new items in the collection.

The MCADDeditor invites comments and suggestions from all users to assist in the improvement and expansion of the collection and the operation of the site. In particular, users are requested to contact MCADDeditor@gmail.com if they know of additional digital or paper material that they believe should be added to the collection. Other websites are also encouraged to link to MCADD materials in order to assist in its wide dissemination. Some materials of possible interest to Himalayan scholars are available to PAHAR, but have not been posted on this website for a variety of reasons. Researchers searching for particular difficult-to-find materials are invited to contact the MCADDeditor if they do not find what they are looking for on this site.

This material is placed here by PAHAR to assist scholars, researchers, enthusiasts and mountain lovers and is for personal, non-commercial use only. Any attempt to make commercial use of these materials will be grounds for barring further access to the site.

A word about copyright

In the modern world it is not always easy to be sure of the copyright status of an individual document. In presenting the MCADD dataset, PAHAR has attempted to select and present on its website only documents that are free of copyright restrictions. The Notice and Takedown policy published on this PAHAR website, details the process a copyright holder should follow in the event it appears an existing copyright has been inadvertently violated. PAHAR will remove from its website any item under legitimate copyright dispute, and will only re-post the item after a copyright resolution has been reached or the copyright claim has been found to lack merit.

Happy Hunting,

MCADD Editor