That is Anna Centenary Library for the non-Tamil.

(Pic source: Wikipedia)

I wasn’t going to leave Chennai without visiting this library. So on a rainy day, I booked a cab and landed in Koturpuram with the children in tow. Totally sigh worthy place. Beautifully conceptualized and constructed and can give any US library a tough competition. Note ‘CAN’ is the keyword here.

Management and administration needs a lot of fine tuning. As a visitor one gets contradicting information regarding what to carry inside, what to leave in the car. We were asked to leave our purses and carry just our cellphones in to the building, very surprising considering that majority of the population arrives in bus or by walk! After we crossed the lobby we found ourselves in front of the coffee shop without our purse. When asked the security told me, ‘Madam you must have put some rupee notes in your pant pocket’. For which my response was, ‘What if I am not wearing pants or pants without pockets?’ and I instantly regretted it! Thankfully the lady replied, ‘Most of them who come here wear pants’ instead of, ‘Inside your bra, like women did in good old days’.

The children’s section was the only section I visited. If I had more time I would have checked out the manuscripts section also. The library is not yet set up for checking out books. They have OPAC set up only through intranet, which means the catalog can only be accessed from the within the library.

I searched the catalog through the computer and was delighted to find many of my favorites showing up. The initial purchase was 70,000 books, I was told. No one knew if they will be buying more books and who is in charge of it. But the classification and arrangement was very confusing for me. They follow Dewey Decimal Classification for shelving, but when it comes to the end user, DDC must be transparent, IMO. Also the number of staff are simply not enough to check inventory and shelve the books for the number of visitors. End result chaos, fiction picture books and non-fiction chapter books shelved next to each other, tables heaped with books, one whole section of the library piled with books pulled out by children and cordoned off to be shelved later(which was after the winter break and school reopen I was told by the staff!).

Hopefully we don’t grow complacent that we have South India’s largest library and neglect the upkeep, if the library stays as a library, that is!