Rare books at Connemara will be a click away

CHENNAI: In a bid to preserve its vast collection of rare and erstwhile books more than a century old, the Connemara Public Library is all set to digitise its old books section in the next one month and place it online for users to access it from anywhere.

“The digitisation of about 1.25 lakh rare and erstwhile books would be completed in a month’s time as we have already digitised about 15,000 books,” the School Education Secretary D Sabitha told mediapersons after the inauguration of the World Book Day celebrations at the library.

The digitisation would help library users and book lovers save time as they would not be required to go to the library to refer to the rare collection.

All the books would be scanned and saved in the server, and the work for installing a separate server was in progress, she added.

The digitisation would help conserve the printed heritage for future generations as the physical browsing of the books would damage them.

Digitisation would also help in doing away with the mending, repairing and binding of the books damaged due to human error.

The work of digitisation was being carried out in association with the Anna Centenary Library.

“We are planning to increase the bandwidth ofthe computer network from two Megabytes per second (MBPS) to 10 Megabytes so that users in large numbers would be able to access books at the same time,” she said.

Asked where the department would shore up funds for the project, she said the Anna Centenary Library had received enough funds and the same would be used for implementing the project.

The rare collections of the 125-year-old library were thrown open to public on the occasion of World Book Day.

The library housed some of the oldest books in the world. According to the secretary,  the library possessed one of the oldest Bibles dating back to the 16th century. “In fact, it is older than the Bible in the United Kingdom,” she added.