The lost world of libraries in India

THe Business Standard – India has a look at some ooooollllddd libraries in India. But, however distinguished the provenance of these three, as also that of the Dayal Singh Public Library in Delhi and other public libraries elsewhere in the country, they are all rather sad places today. Only PhD students come here now to trawl the dusty shelves of uncared for books, rummage through the crumbling cards and brave the apathetic sloth of the staff for the early and rare editions of novels and journals.

May 20, 2007 by Uncategorized 1

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1 Response

  1. jbz says:
    May 22, 2007 at 12:48 am

    Indian libraries–dusty, lack technology
    This story definitely matches my experience in visiting the Orissa State Library in Bubaneshwar last December. There wasn’t a computer anywhere in sight of the public areas, and no card catalog either. The librarians were gracious enough to show me around–they were quite proud of their American Literature collection that had a few books from the early 1990s, and of their own classification system for geographic literature. They did seem to have a fairly complete collection on the history of the region and state of Orissa, but it was hard to imagine doing serious research there.

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