Kalapan Digital Library is the result of almost two decades of collaborative work that first began when the late Shahab Ahmad and Usman Rizvi decided to work together to collect more than 15,000 rare books from the latter half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century.

With a vision to preserve and make these materials accessible to researchers throughout the world Usman Rizvi and his team at Kalapan worked with a wide range of library staff at Stanford University Libraries to ensure metadata creation and digitization was at the highest level. In 2023 upon completing the digitization and metadata work for all 15,000 books the team at Kalapan began work on building the first web module focused on Islamic Studies.

On behalf of the entire team kalapan we are pleased to launch the first of many planned modules to provide researchers reliable access to some of the rarest materials from South Asia.