Crack team for book hub

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