Book fair a boost for renewed interest in dist central library

(Rep image)

The number of people accessing District Central Library has increased this year after several new services were introduced in the past 12 months.
In a bid to make the library a community-hub, several activities, coaching classes and health-and-wellness sessions are being offered for people of various age groups and a few e-learning services were also introduced in the last one year.
As a part of series of initiatives and activities, a seven-day book fair was kick-started at the library on the occasion of World Book Day on Monday. In tie-up with several publishers, the fair features varied range of academic, fictional and non-fictional books in English and Tamil, at a discount of 10%.


A debate on the topic- 'Whether reading books helps in leading material life or meaningful life’- was also held. “We have been constantly conducting programmes in order to make the library a place of knowledge creation instead of just knowledge seeking,” district library officer, A P Sivakumar said. “Keeping pace with the time and going beyond just offering book-lending services is very crucial to make sure libraries are still sought-after by people,” he told TOI.

This year, at least 1,000 people have been visit the library everyday on an average, he added. As a part of community-building initiatives, yoga classes (on Fridays), coaching classes for railway recruitment examinations (on Sundays), art classes (on the third Sunday of every month), and story-telling sessions (on the fourth Sunday of every month) are being conducted by experts at the library.
Also, Women Readers Forum was setup at the library last month, through which talk and awareness sessions on topics like ‘Importance of mental and physical health of women’ are being conducted.
With the help of students from National Institute of Technology in Trichy (NIT-T), the library has been creating audio books for people with visual impairment. “We want to also make the library as inclusive as possible,” Sivakumar said. Apart from this, the e-learning services, like e-book reader and DELNET, which are available at the library, are being used by research scholars.

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