Post date: Jul 13, 2013 12:7:37 PM
Authorities of a very old library in India's western Pune city digitize books from the 1940s so that readers can easily access them as they are not available anywhere else.
PUNE, MAHARASHTRA, INDIA (JULY 12, 2013) (ANI) - Authorities of a very old library in India's western Pune city digitized books from the 1940s so that readers can easily access them as they are not available anywhere else.
The library of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune contains a treasure of around 278 thousand books amongst which at least 50000 are even older than the era of 1940s and 2000 are very rare as they are neither available in the market nor in any other library.But as some of them are not in a readable condition so the library authorities decided to make them available on their website so that the book lovers can easily get access to these books.
Nanaji G. Shewale, a librarian in Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics said on Friday (July 12) that they are receiving requests from different parts of the world to get more and more books digitized.
"The site has right now 9000 collection of which 6500 are books from which there are around 2000 rare books are there. We also have other documents like institutional publications, which are meant for sale, but as a policy we have decided to make them available freely to the public. We are receiving request from different parts of the world to get these documents digitized," said Shewale.
He added that till now they have digitized all the rare books from 1680 onwards to almost 1800 and more are still under process.
The digitization process started in July, 2011 and after the digitization of 9000 books till now, they are targeting to digitize at least 15, 000 more till March 14th and their aim is to digitize 50000.
The library was established by the Indian Nationalist Leader, Gopal Krishna Gokhale in 1905 after discussing the political issues by Mahatma Gandhi whom he considered as his mentor.