Resources

To ensure their pursuits of research, enhancement and training, the teams can now rely entirely on two solid “transversal structures”:

• A Laboratory of Applied Informatics and Geomatics. It is the main actor in several research projects conducted in the three departments of the Institute, contributes to the policy of enhancing the scientific heritage of the Institute and participates in the publication. It is moreover responsible for the management and development of computer resources at the Institute.

• An integrated Centre of Documentary Resources. The decision was taken in 2003 to create a unique Centre of Documentary Resources so as to enable of a modern, integrated management of the documentary resources of the Institute and to facilitate their access by the general public.

Research teams of the FIP have several collections of research materials collected during several decades at their disposal

• A collection of palm leaf manuscripts on South Indian Sivaism (the largest collection in the world of texts on Saivasiddhanta);

• An invaluable collection of 136 000 photographs of temples, buildings and statuary of South India, some of which have since disappeared.

• An herbarium which contains more than 27.000 specimen belonging to 4000 species (most of them endemics), a large number of them having been collected from the “hot spot” of Western Ghats (Sout-West India).

• Nearly 3,000 topographic maps and around 500 thematic maps on India and South and Southeast Asian countries and about 100 recent satellite images covering mostly South India have been assembled. These documents constitute the primary sources of reference for researchers from various disciplines working at the Institute..

FIP publisher : FIP has brought out a total of around 250 publications (books, working papers, CD-ROMs and maps) in the fields of Indology, Ecology and Social sciences since its creation in 1955