With everything going digital in India, Thane’s oldest library has been transformed into a digital platform and is not a traditional library now. The Marathi Granth Sanghralaya was established by Vinayak Laxman Bhave in 1883 and was the first Marathi library in the country.
Since November 2017, the library has started the digitisation of books and over thousand books will be available for free online as e-books by July this year. The process of converting the books includes scanning, indexing, and converting them into PDF format. Around 1,777 books have been converted and are available online.
People who have been subscribing to the library including senior citizens are delighted that they will be able to read some of the literature, which dates back to 100 years ago, at their residence comfortably.
The Library has almost 2.9 lakh books from different genres and 16 dictionaries that needs to be converted as e-books for the readers to access them online.
However, that can only happen once the indexing of books, after scanning them, is completed. The Library has received around ₹50 lakh for the same.
Librarian Pranali Khobole said that the idea of digitising the books came in order to restore them and if the books are online, people across the world can access these books.
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