Library

Sivanath Sastri College Library: A Heritage

As an extended part of the nineteenth century Brahmo educational movement, Sivanath Sastri College strives to provide quality education to women. The library of this college grew out of the great heritage and lives upto the ideal set forth in the teachings of the great pioneer of women’s emancipation, Pandit Sivanath Sastri. Hard pressed for space and manpower the library works against all odds to see young minds bloom and to assist in igniting flames of knowledge. It grows to help the community to grow.

About the library

The library has a good collection of books on all subjects taught in the college as well as on related subjects. The library has five separate units: 1) Central library 2) Honours library 3) Staff-room library 4) Departmental library of the Department of Geography 5) Departmental library of the Department of Botany. All categories of users can borrow books from the Central library, but access to the Honours Seminar library is restricted to the Honours students and the teachers. Staff-room library is for class room reference and the departmental libraries are for the teachers and the students of the respective departments. Apart from the books acquired under college grant and UGC grant, there is a small collection of books donated by the users and well wishers named ‘Prafulla Chandra Roy Text Book Library ‘

Salient features:

1) The library has a collection of more than 40000 books procured from the beginning in 1964 till February 2020.
2) The library also has a small collection of conventional reference books.
3) At present the library can be called a semi computerized library. Only daily transaction of books is done manually.
4) Computerised cataloguing started in the year 2004 with WINISIS. But at present Open Source Library Management Software Koha (version 19.05 on Ubuntu 12.04 customised by the Bengal Library Association) is in use. A total of 23285 books have been recorded in the database, excluding the books lost, damaged and out dated.
5) Bar coding is complete for all books in regular use.
6) Recently RFID technology has also been introduced. For the time being both barcode and RFID tag would be used for all books added in the library from the current academic session 2019-2020.
7) Online access to the library catalogue is available. The library catalogue can be searched through OPAC in the college website
8) Reading room facility is available for the users. In the Central library there is a large reading room which can accommodate more than 70 students at a time.
9) Internet facility is also available for the users in the Central Library.
10) The outgoing final year students get the library facility upto their University final examination.
11) The Casual students can also avail of the library facilities.
12) Needy students can avail of the long term loan facility from the UGC Book Bank.
13) A few periodicals which can help the students in their career advancement as well as make them aware of the current affairs are procured by the library.
14) The library is a member of the NLIST programme of UGC
15) The college library is also an online member of National Digital Library

Objectives/Vision:

• Despite major constraints of inadequacy of space, infrastructure and manpower the library looks forward to future expansion and modernization.
• Our library aspires to be a modern open access library in near future