The Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), set up in 1916 to promote surveys, exploration and research to further understanding of India’s rich animal life, has made available all its published documents in digitized format.

The digitization project of ZSI’s archives encompasses more than 200,000 pages of printed material.

What more? This large body of information is now available as a text-searchable, easily accessible digital archive. All the volumes published by the ZSI have been digitised using state-of-the-art technology and software, according to the taxonomic research organization’s website.

These publications have been electronically restored and can be downloaded in the Portable Document Format (PDF) or viewed in the DjVu format (DjVu plugin should be installed for which the ‘Get DjVu’ link in the sidebar can be used. DjVu format is not supported in Google Chrome browser and hence ‘Download (PDF)’ links may be used.) They can be searched fully with different search filters. Text searches can be made across all publications or restricted by the user to any particular publication, year, author, taxon, etc, ZSI says.

This represents a very valuable resource for research on Indian fauna and all for free. Priceless!

The ZSI had its genesis as the Zoological Section of the Indian Museum at Calcutta in 1875. Since its inception, the ZSI has been documenting the diversity and distribution of the fauna of India towards carrying out its mandate of conducting exploration-cum-taxonomic-research programmes. The ZSI has published an extremely large amount of information on all animal taxa, from Protozoa to Mammalia. This information is a boon to researchers, students, conservation managers and amateur naturalists.

To visit ZSI’s digital archives, click here.