Chennai: Increased supply of books from Central library and donation of books by people are helping public libraries hit badly by floods to begin functioning smoothly.
According to the Directorate of Public Libraries, some publishers plan to donate nearly 5,000 books on Tuesday to the Ashok Nagar library, which was most affected by the floods.
“We have supplied nearly 12,000 books from the Central Public Library to the one in Ashok Nagar. Libraries that faced lesser damage were supplied books soon after the floods to keep them working. Affected libraries also received book donations from public and from Connemara Public Library,” said district library officer S. Elango Chandra Kumar.
He had invited donations for the affected libraries through his Facebook page and has got a good response to it.
With the state supplying over 10,000 books and publishers pledging to donate books to flood-hit libraries, librarians feel that functioning will smoothen over the days.
“The number of borrowers per day before the floods was around 300, now it is around 200. Things are slowly getting back to normal,” said a librarian at Ashok Nagar Public Government Library. “Just after the floods, we received over 10,000 books from the central public library. Now, readers have started coming back and hopefully number of members will increase too.”
Ashok Nagar and Puthu Theru libraries were two of the badly hit libraries during the floods, which led to a loss of over five lakh books.
