Waiting for days and hours to lay hands on a book of one’s choice in a public library will slip into history very soon.
Flipping through soiled pages of some valuable book for reference will also change to accessing these books in a well-lit swanky room in digital format on a large screen of a computer monitor in the heart of Anantapur city.
Students from all corners of the district flock to the District Central Library for accessing engineering, medicine and reference books for competitive examinations and read under poor light in an old building.
Thanks to the special interest taken by Hindupur MLA Nandamuri Balakrisna and financial and planning assistance given by Anantapur-based Rural Development Trust, the Vicente Ferrer Digital Library will be reality within a week, Grandhalaya Samstha Chairman J. Ghouse Moiddin told The Hindu .
The state-of-the-art library has 30,000 titles in digital format and aims at having 2 lakh titles eventually serving to 36 members simultaneously on large computer monitors.
The Trust invested more than ₹1.2 crore on the construction of the facility providing furniture and modern book racks for the existing physical books.
An advanced book scanner converts sought-after books into PDF format and allows students, the majority of members, to access them simultaneously. Housed in a well-ventilated two-floor building, it has space for reading hard copies too. The output of the scanner is of the finest quality, said Mr. Moiddin displaying the working of the equipment.
A separate section has been established for the senior citizens storing books of their interest including religious ones like the Bible, the Ramayana, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita etc., said library secretary N. Lalitha.
The entry into the Digital Library will be through swiping a smart card for members. The membership can be obtained by paying ₹100 and ₹30 for the card.
It has a 64-terabyte storage space which can store about 2.5 lakh titles. The district will soon have 12 more digital libraries in other mandal headquarters with a link provided from here. A local Internet service provider has given high-speed connection free-of-cost to the library.
