Piles of voluminous books, clouded by dust and nibbled away by bugs, are finding a new life in the nearly two-century-old Kottayam public library. Nearly 30,000 books published before the 1960s are being digitised as part of a major preservation exercise. Once complete, these titles will be available as free PDFs on the library’s official website.

“This library holds around 2.5 lakh books, including 50,000 in the reference section. Many are centuries old and stored separately for preservation, but maintaining them physically has become increasingly difficult. That is why we turned to digitisation,” explains K C Vijayakumar, secretary of the library.

The project is being carried out with the Palakkad-based Indic Digital Archive Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated especially to archiving Indic-language cultural materials. “About 30,000 rare books are currently being digitised. We aim to make them freely accessible to researchers, students, and the public,” says Vijayakumar.

Tony Antony, project coordinator for the foundation, notes that copyright restrictions apply. “Only works whose copyrights have expired or whose authors/publishers have given consent are included,” he says. The scanning process itself is being handled in partnership with the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT).

At the library’s digitisation unit, cameras, scanning bases, lights, and computers are in place. “Two pages can be scanned simultaneously in about 30 seconds. However, each page must be flipped manually. Each image is checked instantly, and errors are corrected with a re-scan,” explains Rahul Chandran of C-DIT.

The library also plans pest-control and air-conditioning measures to protect older volumes from silverfish and dust. “Books more than 65 years old often suffer severe damage. Fumigation and climate control are essential to preserve them,” says President Abraham Ittichira.

Founded in 1882 by T Rama Rao, the Kottayam Public Library has grown far beyond a book-lending space. Today, it houses theatre, Scrabble and fitness clubs, study halls, and an art gallery. “It has become a cultural hub of Kottayam that welcomes people from all walks of life,” Ittichira adds.

Among the library's treasures are palm-leaf manuscripts, commemorative volumes, family histories, magazines, and old souvenirs — works rarely found elsewhere. “The value of these documents only increases with time. Digitisation is our only way of safeguarding them for the future,” says Vijayakumar.

The digital collection will be available on both the library’s website and the Indic Digital Archive Foundation’s portal, Grandhappura, which already hosts a large archive of rare works.