Connemara Public Library
Encyclopedia
Chennai
Chennai , formerly known as Madras or Madarasapatinam , is the capital city of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, located on the Coromandel Coast off the Bay of Bengal. Chennai is the fourth most populous metropolitan area and the sixth most populous city in India...
is one of the four National Depository Libraries
Library
In a traditional sense, a library is a large collection of books, and can refer to the place in which the collection is housed. Today, the term can refer to any collection, including digital sources, resources, and services...
which receive a copy of all books, newspapers and periodicals published in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
. Established in 1890 the library is a repository of centuries-old publications, wherein lie some of the most respected works and collections in the country. It also serves as a depository library for the UN.
History
The Library's beginnings go back to 1860, when Jean Mitchel set up a small library as part of the Madras Museum. Hundreds of books had been found to be surplus in the libraries of Haileybury College (where Indian civilians were trained in England) and these were sent to the Madras Government, which in turn handed them over to the Madras Museum. Conceived on the lines of the British MuseumBritish Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
Library, it was part of the Madras Museum till 1890, when the need for a free public library
Public library
A public library is a library that is accessible by the public and is generally funded from public sources and operated by civil servants. There are five fundamental characteristics shared by public libraries...
prompted the then Governor of Madras
Governors of Madras
-English Agents:In 1639, the grant of Madras to the English was finalized between the factors of the Masulipatnam factory, represented by Francis Day, and the Raja of Chandragiri. In 1640, Andrew Cogan, the chief of the Masulipatnam factory, made his way to Madras in the company of Francis Day and...
, Lord Connemara
Robert Bourke, 1st Baron Connemara
Robert Bourke, 1st Baron Connemara GCIE, PC was a British Conservative politician and colonial administrator...
, to lay the foundation on 22 March 1890. It opened in 1896 and was indeed essentially free: a small deposit had to be paid but this was refundable. It became the state central library in 1948.
The library was as part of a cultural complex that grew in the grounds of what was once called The Pantheon. The entire complex now boasts buildings that reflect architectural unity, even while demonstrating the various stages of Indo-Saracenic development, from Gothic-Byzantine to Rajput Mughal and Southern Hindu Deccani.
The new building, which was added to the Library in 1973, has a vast collection of books, a much sought after text-book section, a periodicals hall, a reference room, a video room, an entire floor for books from the Indian languages
Languages of India
The languages of India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages—Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian languages...
, a Braille
Braille
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing.Braille was devised in 1825 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character, or cell, is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two...
Library and an IAS study centre. Efforts are on to fully computerise the library database, which could ensure easy access to books. The library has a collection of over 600,000 books.
In 1981 the central government ordered that the library became one of the four national depository libraries.
Librarians
- Dr. Edgar ThurstonEdgar ThurstonEdgar Thurston CIE was a British museologist and ethnographer working in colonial Southern India. In 1885 he was appointed to the Madras Government Museum, where he held the role of Superintendent...
, C.I.E. 1896 - 1908 - Dr. J.R. Henderson, C.I.E. 1908 - 1919
- Dr. F.H. Gravely, D.Sc. 1920 - 1938
- R. Janarthanam Naidu 1939 - 1950
- K. Govinda Menon 1951 - 1958
- K. Rajagopalan 1959 - 1962
- Ve. Thillainayagam 1963 - 1972
- A.M. Sundararajan 1972 - 1981
- C.K Sundararajan 1981
- A.M Sundararajan