The British Library’s Asian holdings find their origins in the India Library, the library of the English East India Company, which was established in 1801. When the company was abolished in 1858 the library was renamed the India Office Library and functioned thereafter as the library of the British government department which administered the territories of British India until independence in August 1947. Responsibility for running it passed from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to the British Library in 1982. In 1991 the Library merged with the Oriental Collections of the British Museum to become part of the Oriental and India Office Collections, moving to St. Pancras in August 1998. It includes books, manuscripts and journals from all over Asia and North Africa, amounting to hundreds of thousands of documents, from ancient times to the present day. The bulk of the British Library’s holdings in western languages has been catalogued and can be searched on the web. Material in oriental languages is not accessible online and is described in various card and printed book catalogues available for consultation in the Reading Room. There is not an Afghanistan section but the collection is arranged on a regional/language basis.