Sporting a swanky periodicals section and a refurbished reference section, the renovated Kerala University Library will be inaugurated by Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac on Friday.
It was Dr. Isaac himself who had launched the Rs.3-crore modernisation drive on April 23, 2008.
The periodicals section has been air-conditioned and given a new floor. The two-storey tall reference section has been re-modelled into two floors. While the ground floor will continue to house the reference section, the upper floor will be earmarked for research scholars at the library.
The ground floor of the four-storey ‘stack room' that houses the library's main collection has also been renovated and air-conditioned.
As part of the modernisation drive, close to Rs.60 lakh has been spend on updating the library's stock of books. The digitisation of select records, launched in 2008 as part of the modernisation drive, is still in progress.
Over six-lakh pages of books, periodicals and newspapers are scheduled to be digitised by the educational informatics team of the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology using an indigenously developed system called Document Capture and Archives Management System (D-CAMS). The digitised pages would be converted into a ‘pdf' file through a three-stage process and then loaded on to a server in the library.
