Indian Agencies In India

National Library Of India

The National Library of India is India’s largest library and is located in the Belvedere Estate in the city of Kolkata. Under the administration of the Ministry of Tourism and Culture’s Department of Culture, the National Library of India currently houses an excess of 2.2 million titles in books and documents. The functions of the library include the gathering of print publications that are published in India or authored by Indians or any material of any interest to the citizens of India as per the Delivery of Books and Newspapers Act of 1954. Its collections of are also repository, meaning that they have to be permanently stored in the library. One of the duties of the National Library of India is the systematic preservation of all the official documents of the government as a Public Records library.

History of NLI

Calcutta Public Library which was started in 1836 was a private library which was a proprietorship concern in the beginning. Lord Metcalf the Governor General of India shifted 4,675 books from the library of Fort William College to Calcutta Library and along with donations from individuals these books were the core of the library. Dwarkanath Tagore was the first member of Calcutta Library.

Imperial Library was established in 1891 by amalgamation of many Secretariat libraries like the Home Department library, which housed books that were previously in the libraries of Fort William, East India College, and the East India Board in London.

Lord Curzon, in the early twentieth century, decided to add the collection to the Imperial Library, on certain conditions.

This library was also known as Imperial Library and was formally introduced for public use in January 1903. John Macfarlane was the first Librarian of the Imperial Library. After his death, eminent scholar Harinath De became the first Indian librarian.

After Independence Government of India renamed it as the National Library. On 1 February 1953, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad inaugurated the National Library B. S. Kesavan was the first Librarian.

Collection

The collection of books in the National Library of India is maintained by separate Language Departments. There exists a separate department for Indian Languages that is in turn divided as per each language as follows:

• Assamese
• Bengali
• Bengali
• Hindi
• Kannada
• Kashmiri
• Malayalam
• Marathi
• Oriya
• Punjabi
• Sanskrit
• Sindhi
• Tamil
• Telugu
• Urdu

These individual departments are responsible for all the literature of their respective languages and to respond to reference demands. All Indian publishers of print media send each and every publication to the National Library of India to be cataloged and stored by the directive of the Delivery of Books and Newspapers Act of 1954.

Modernization and Digitization

The Computer division was created in 1988 to handle the modernization of the library with RDBMS software used for bibliographic control activities.

In 2001 the library switched over to a client-server environment and presently a Campus Wide Network is being developed.

The digital archiving of rare and delicate books and other documents is in progress. English books and documents published prior to 1900 and Indian publications before 1920 are up for digitization. At present over 3, 20,000 pages of 9140 selected books have been archived digitally.