North East News Agency

The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi has sanctioned a major research project on Rural Libraries in the North East India with Dr. Naroadra Lahkar, Head, Department of Library and Information Science, Guwahati University as the Project Director. The work is for bringing out in machine readable form a Database of Rural Libraries of NE India and to include all rural libraries of the states of NE India - Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Maghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura

It is found that there are various categories of rural libraries in the region established by Voluntary organizations or NGOs or by any other agencies or individuals extending services to the rural masses. These libraries are the basis of rural development in different spheres: socio-economic, socio-cultural, socio-educational and other related areas. Different types of activities of rural masses are centered round the rural libraries located in the locality. They are not developed due to various reasons.

There is, therefore, a great need to study the organization, management and services of these rural libraries and their impact among the rural masses of the region and ouislde as well. Considering the urgent need of study on the area, the project proposal was submitted to the ICSSR, New Delhi for preparing a machine readable database of the Rural I libraries of the North East India in order to use it as a ready reference tool and the iiC’SSR has accepted the proposal for the study.

The database will be created using UNESCO’s CDS/ISIS package, which has immense potentialities of easy, pinpointed, exhaustive search techniques with scope of sorting, printing and indexing facilities in both DOS and WINDOWS environment. Because of its nature of creation in machine readable form, regular development by imiputtiRg new records will be another advantage to the process.

The work plans to make an intensive survey through a prescribed questionnaire, personal visit to libraries, discussing with the professional colleagues to bring out the work in near possible perfect manner.

Individuals and organizations in general and rural librarians of the region in particular are requested to send the name and address including uhe PIN code of the rural libraries of their locality to the Project Director, Dept of ILrilbrairy aadi Information Science, Gauhati University, Guwahati-781014. The questionnaire will be sent to these addresses with a self addressed stamped envelop.

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