Presently, very few legislators are seen entering the library room. The library is off limits for the general public. This being the case, the Libraries Committee of the legislature has recommended for the digitisation process, in the hope that legislators make use of it more effectively.
The aim is to make the 1.30 lakh-odd books, proceedings of the legislature and other documents available to the legislators at the click of a button. The Committee took the decision to go digital in 2008 with the project being executed by Bangalore University.
Council Chairman D H Shankaramurthy, the chairman of the committee, said that recently, the State government had decided to gift the MLCs with iPads 2, mainly for this purpose. With the e-library being made functional in the next three months, legislators could access the literature from wherever they are.
Dr P V Konnur, librarian, BU and his team have completed cataloguing the books, while it is being contemplated to hand over the digitisation process to the Digital Library of India.
Shankaramurthy said that ultimately he would like to link the Karnataka library to e-libraries of other States and also that of Parliament.
He said that as an Opposition leader in 2001-02, he had toured Ubrani hobli in Channagiri taluk of Davangere district, where he was moved by the drinking water problems of the people.
“I made a visit to the library to find out more about the region and the ways in which water could be supplied there. Today, the project has neared completion and people of Ubrani and surrounding villages will soon have drinking water,” he said.
The Channagiri-Ubrani Lift irrigation project entails about 1.2 TMC of water being lifted from the Bhadra River and stored in a lake in Ubrani, which is in turn linked to other lakes.
As in May this year, the library had a collection of about 1.30 lakh volumes of printed books, reports, government publications, debates, gazettes and other documents.
The library that was set up in 1930 has literature pertaining to a wide range of topics.
Debates of Indian Parliament, state legislatures, reports of central and state governments, United Nations and its agencies, Gazettes of central and state governments, periodicals and publications brought out by the Secretariats of the two Houses, are the other important collections in the library. The collections are primarily in English and Kannada.
