Karnataka   

TTD appeals for rare books, manuscripts

Staff Reporter

BANGALORE: The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) has appealed to publishers, library authorities, personal collectors, institutions and others who have in their possession valuable books, manuscripts, palm leaves and copper plates, to come forward and give them for digitising by the TTD's S.V. Digital Library.

The digital library has taken up the task of getting ancient and valuable books digitised so that they can be preserved for posterity.

According to B.S. Reddy, Director of the S.V. Digital Library, this effort was part of a larger project taken up by the Digital Library of India to digitise all significant literary, artistic and scientific works to preserve "our cultural heritage so that they can be freely available to those who are interested in such works."

"TTD will take care to receive such books and scan and return them intact. A copy of the digitised matter will be presented to the particular organisation, which has contributed the manuscript, free of cost. All incidental expenditures shall be borne by TTD itself in the process of securing the valued books till they are returned after being digitised," Mr. Reddy said on Sunday.

He said the mission of the project was to create a portal for the Digital Library of India, which would enable people to have access to all those books and to create a collection of one million books in the first phase, predominantly in Indian languages.

Mr. Reddy said the S.V. Digital Library had three centres — one each in Tirupati, Chennai and Bangalore.

The Bangalore centre has been functioning for two months and has taken up digitisation work of over 3,000 books from the Poornaprajna Vidyapeetha.

"As of now, the library has digitised 30,000 books in different languages, including Telugu, Sanskrit, Kannada, Tamil and English, and these are available on the Internet. These books are on religion, culture, history and science," he added.

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