The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, has digitized various documents from their library. This includes a “Sri Lanka collection,” which consists mainly of photographs, including some from the nineteenth century, but most from a collection taken in 1960 by the anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf focused on everyday life in Sri Lanka, with emphasis on religious and cultural performances, fisherfolk, and portraiture. SOAS also has a collection of Sinhalese Language Resources. The full set includes digitized volumes on grammar, early-twentieth-century print books with a strength in Sinhala poetry, and several palm-leaf manuscripts in Sinhala, Pali, and Sanskrit. The full digital collection of palm-leaf manuscripts also contains two Sinhala texts missing from the Sinhalese collection: a jataka commentary and a yantra book with intricate illustrations. Although not directly related to Sri Lanka, the SOAS library also has a page for Tamil Language Resources.
Another useful resource is the SOAS Research Online portal—a database of research by faculty and students from SOAS. The most effective way to use this is through the advanced search. The database contains a variety of journal articles, book chapters, working papers and even books. However, not all items are full text. A unique feature of this collection is unpublished PhD theses, which are available in full text. A search of theses with “Lanka” or “Ceylon” in the title brings up 37 items, and a search for “Sinhalese” brings up another 16 items, submitted between 1936 and 2016.
