Delhi Public Library books' catalogue to go online

New Delhi, Oct.1 : Delhi Public Library, main building of which is located near the old Railway station in the city, has decided to put its current catalogue online from October 2.

The online catalogue will include a section on current acquisitions and books received under the Delivery of Books Act from 2007.

"The new facility being provided for the first time by any Indian library will enable downloading bibliographical information of Indian language books from the DPL site in Marc 21 format which is followed by libraries in the country," said a senior Library official.

"At present about 20,000 currently acquired books have been enlisted in the new catalogue system. The remaining old collection of books available in the library will also be made available online in a phased manner in near future," the official added.

The new catalogue system being offered through Koha 3.0 open source library software could be accessed by visiting the official website www.dpl.gov.in/ and http://59.176.17.111.

As retro-conversion of such a massive collection is a gigantic and time- consuming task, hence Delhi Public Library has decided to introduce Koha in different phases.

The books' online catalogue (OPAC) facility is hoped to prove a major relief for Delhi Public Library, which has about 45,000 members and users from across the world who can now easily locate favourite books out of its huge collection. They will have a far less cumbersome task to locate the required books than it used to be till date.

ANI