4 months on, turning to lending sends up Anna Centenary Library patronage, membership
Also, to meet the growing demand among readers and to provide a variety of reading materials, the ACL – which functions under the School Education Department – has purchased 80,000 new books.
Anna Centenary Library
CHENNAI: The decision to lend books instead of allowing members to only refer and read them at its premises seems to have worked for Anna Centenary Library (ACL), as it has lent 11,000 books in the four months since the change.
The sprawling library has also seen a spike in membership in these four months, growing to 7,200 from 5,500 members, said a librarian there.
Also, to meet the growing demand among readers and to provide a variety of reading materials, the ACL – which functions under the School Education Department – has purchased 80,000 new books.
Speaking to DT Next, the librarian said, "Fourteen years after starting ACL as a referral library, the department decided to begin lending books. It began in March second week and till late July, as many as 11,000 books have been lent."
Besides turning into a lending library, the management has also undertaken several new initiatives from December last year, including introducing corporate membership to get large companies collaborate with it.
The librarian said after a slew of new initiatives were taken up, the library had been garnering higher footfall, readership and membership.
More than one lakh books are available for members to lend in the first phase. These books are kept on three floors - children's section on the first floor, Tamil language section on the second floor, and the fiction section on the fourth floor.
The largest among these is the Tamil section that has more than 80,000 books available for lending. Among the remaining, 10,000 books are available in the children's section (except dictionaries and encyclopedias) and a same number of books in the English fiction section.
Explaining the purchase of new books, the librarian said, "The committee that was formed for this purpose listed a set of books for Madurai Library and ACL. We have purchased 80,000 new books at a cost of Rs 3 crore for ACL. Of them, 36,000 are Tamil books and 44,000 are in English books."
