Dhaka University Library

One of the three buildings of the university library

The Library of the University of Dhaka (Dhaka University Library) is the most important library in Bangladesh . The library was founded in 1921 in connection with the university , which started teaching with 877 students (over 37,000 in 2016, with 1,885 teachers working there). The students lived on campus according to the Oxford model . In addition to the administration building, there is a main building and a scientific library. In 1952, as in the rest of the country, the Bengali language became compulsory.

Until 1963, the Bangladesh Central Public Library was also part of the university library . With the independence (1971) of East Pakistan , known as Bangladesh , the library received the status of the main library of the new state, which from 1973 onwards led to increased independence for this institution as well. In 1993 the collection of the university library comprised more than 500,000, according to other sources 1 million volumes from all scientific disciplines, apart from engineering , technology and medicine. As early as 1993, around 25,000 manuscripts were added to the book inventory, dating back to the 14th century, which also makes the library the largest archive in the country. In 2015 there were around 30,000 manuscripts and 125 periodicals.

Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy for Abdul Mannan from 1928

The training of librarians goes back to the American Asa Don Dickenson , who had set up the first facility at the local university in Lahore in 1915. When he gave up the management, there was no more training until 1918. In 1921 the library of the University of Dhaka was set up with a few holdings from the Dhaka College and the Aliah Medrese . Postgraduate training was initiated in 1928 , with German and French becoming compulsory subjects in 1936. In the course of the splitting up of India and the independence of Pakistan , to which today's Bangladesh as East Pakistan belonged, again no training courses took place from 1946 to 1950. From 1947 to 1957 there was no librarianship in East Pakistan, apart from the three-month training courses for the staff of the Dhaka library, which was run by Fazle Elahi , "one of the best librarians in South Asia".

The pioneer of library science in East Pakistan was Muhammad Siddique Khan , usually shortened to 'MS Khan', who was trained in Great Britain. After returning to his homeland in 1956, he modernized the library system in East Pakistan. In 1958 the East Pakistan Library Association (now the Library Association of Bangladesh , LAB for short) set up a first training program in the country, a six-month certificate course. Following the London model, a one-year postgraduate course began in 1959 . In 1962 a one-year master’s course followed under the direction of MS Khan, an MPhil course in 1976, and from 1979 a PhD course. A three-year course in library and information science was launched in 1987 and expanded to four years in 1994. In 2001 the responsible Department of Library and Information Science was reallocated to a Department of Information Science and Library Management . This published volume 1 of the Bangladesh Journal of Library and Information Science in 1998 , which was only followed by the second volume in 2012.

In 2015, the largest "e-library" in Asia opened at the Faculty of Business Studies . This enables students to access the digitized holdings of Oxford University and Cambridge University as well as 33 other university libraries via the Internet .

Web links

• Library website
• University Library , archive.org, June 22, 2012

Remarks

1. ^ Wayne A. Wiegand, Donald G. Davis, Jr. (Eds.): Encyclopedia of Library History , Routledge, 2015, p. 60.
2. ↑ Robert Wedgeworth: World Encyclopedia of Library and Information Services , American Library Association, 1993, p 102nd
3. ^ Wayne A. Wiegand, Donald G. Davis, Jr. (Eds.): Encyclopedia of Library History , Routledge, 2015, p. 60.
4. ↑ Ravindra N. Sharma (Ed.): Libraries in the early 21st century , Vol. 2: An international perspective , Walter de Gruyter, 2012, pp. 106 f.
5. ↑ Md Azizul Hakim. Public Libraries in Bangladesh. History, Problems, and Prospects , Bangla Academy, 2001, p. 137.
6. ↑ Ismail Abdullahi, CR Karisddappa, AY Asundi: LIS Education in Developing Countries. The Road Ahead , Walter de Gruyter, 2014, p. 88.
7. ↑ Ravindra N. Sharma (Ed.): Libraries in the early 21st century , Vol. 2: An international perspective , Walter de Gruyter, 2012, p. 120.
8. ↑ Bangladesh Journal of Library and Information Science , Vol. 1, 1998, contents.
9. ↑ Bangladesh Journal of Library and Information Science , Vol. 2, 2012, contents.
10. ↑ Asia's largest e-Library opens at Dhaka University ( Memento of the original from March 23, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: Dhaka Tribune , August 11, 2015.