The guide opens with a colour section introducing the region's highlights with some photography and essential information on the region's diverse attractions, from enjoying an Ayurvedic massage to exploring the ruins at Hampi. It offers comprehensive and practical advice on everything from finding the best places to stay and the most comfortable means of transport, to spotting elephants in the Cardamon Hills and negotiating Mumbai. It also provides an informative insight into South India's history, religions, architecture, music and dance. There are also maps and plans for every region and town.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Asian Digitial Libraries, ICADL 2002, held in Singapore in December 2002. The 34 revised full papers, 20 revised short papers, and 14 posters presented together with 7 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 170 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on information retrieval, multimedia digital libraries, data mining in digital libraries, special purpose digital libraries, digital library services, digital libraries for community building, information retrieval and Asian languages, building and using digital libraries, metadata issues, algorithms and protocols, human-computer interaction, and digital library infrastructure.