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The ministry of culture set up an advisory board for the National Library on Friday with the aim of making the institution more user-friendly.
The board, meant to guide the director of the library in implementing the culture ministry’s plans, has been formed following the wish of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to give National Library a new life. Singh, who holds the culture portfolio, said “at his first meeting as culture minister that the library has to restore itself to its former glory”, said Jawhar Sircar, the secretary of the ministry of culture, who was in the city on Friday.
The board, constituted for three years, will include historians, scholars and academics such as Partha Chatterjee, Uma Dasgupta, Mukul Kesavan and Supriya Chaudhuri. It will be headed by A.R. Bandopadhyaya, former director of the library. The culture secretary is also on the board. “We are expecting a lot,” said Sircar, a former user of the library himself. “The board should be a knowledge body, pressure body, resource body.” The board will meet for the first time on November 7.
As part of its plans, for which the ministry will seek the board’s suggestions, the ministry intends to improve services for readers and speed up the process of computerisation and the digitisation of old and rare books, and setting up of a new website. Catalogues are being converted into machine-readable formats and backlogs of books piling up are being cleared with outsourced professionals cataloguing them.
On demand from readers, the ministry plans to create a “city hub” out of the Esplanade newspaper reading room, where all digital records of the library will be made available to the scholars. The ministry has also finalised the new recruitment rules for the search-and-selection of a candidate as library director. The post will be advertised soon.
The Telegraph Metro
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The proposed scheme is not, or shouldn't be, merely a matter of upgrading storing facilities; it's also a matter of the restoration of rare, brittle books on the verge of suicide - some as old as the first half of the 19th century - to a less vulnerable state. While the library has chemical and non-chemical methods of eliminating insecta and their eggs in a fumigation chamber, the technology far from adequate, leave alone state-of-the-art.
Then, at least some of the advisory salvage board seems to have been appointed keeping uppermost in mind the impassioned bibliophiles who served the National Library in its glory days: Mukul Kesavan, a fine and prolix, if occasionally overwrought, writer in his own right, is the son of BS Kesavan, the first librarian of the National Library (1948-63, 1970-71), or, as his exact designation went, the first National Librarian of independent India. Uma Das Gupta is the (indisputably learned and capable) wife of a former director (1984-90) of the National Library, Prof Ashin Dasgupta (1922-98).
None of this is to suggest that they don't have the qualifications to refurbish and revivify the National Library. Quite the opposite, in fact: they are just the kind of people needed to oversee the rehabilitation of this Library of Babel - but what they do not have is the organisational wherewithal to negotiate the economic and political corridors of which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who offhandedly set the ball rolling on this scheme, is a professional habitue.
And, as is usual here, the board will meet for the first time only in November, months hence. Clearly, for a library that has been around, as the National Library, since 1953 (and in its earlier avatar as the Imperial Library since 1891), a few months of procrastination is not an issue.
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