People's Democracy

Sundarayya Vignana Kendram Library  Restored

                                                                       M Venugopala Rao

 THE  prestigious  library of Sundarayya Vignana Kendram in Hyderabad has been successfully proceeding with the work of salvaging about one lakh rare books, manuscripts and other materials in Telugu, Urdu and English languages which were submerged and damaged in the flash floods in August 2000. About 90,000  books in the three languages have been restored completely and the process of binding  the same and microfilming of all the important and rare Telugu and Urdu printed materials is going on.

The Sundarayya Vignana Kendram (SVK) houses a public research library with a good collection of rare books, journals, newspapers, reports, pamphlets, manuscripts, private papers, etc, in the three languages, throwing light on the socio-cultural, economic and political histories and popular movements of all types from the 12th to 20th centuries. In 1996, the SVK was entrusted with the task of preserving a very valuable collection of books, manuscripts, journals, periodicals, etc, in Urdu, collected and preserved by Mohamad Abdus Samad Khan, resident of Hyderabad. This Urdu collection was purchased at a cost of $50,000 by Urdu Research Library Consortium, headed by the University of Chicago. The Urdu Research Centre is widely considered as one of the world’s finest with a collection of early Urdu periodicals and printed books, most  of the imprints dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and covering a vast array of disciplines.  The total collection is about 50,000 in number.

In the unusual flash floods that hit the city on August 24, 2000, the SVK building was ravaged and within minutes more than 1,25,000 collections in both the libraries were completely submerged in water. Within five days, on the advice of the international conservation experts, SVK moved the books into a cold storage unit.  Hiring cold storage space at the Foster Cold Storage in the city, most of the valuable books in Telugu, Urdu and English, numbering 60,000, have been kept in - 20 degrees Celsius  to save them from the mold and other fungal attacks which can completely ruin the wet books.  These books are the oldest ones and could not be retrieved by keeping them in + 2 degrees Celsius, for  the paper is very old and in a brittle form.  The rest of the books, numbering around 30,000, have been kept in + 2 degrees Celsius.

Since September 2000, SVK has been in touch with the University of Chicago, who, in turn, had initiated raising technical and financial resources for the restoration of the books damaged in floods. The Cromwell Restoration Technologies in Canada has been hired to undertake the restoration project for a fee. A technical workshop was organised by the staff of the Cromwell Restoration and the staff of the SVK were trained in the restoration work. With the advance of the necessary funding of Rs 1.5 crore from the University of Chicago, the SVK hired the thermal vacuum freeze dryer machine from the Cromwell\Belfor Restoration Co. for the recovery of the damaged books. The large equipment was airlifted from Vancouver to Luxembourg and  then to Chennai.  Thereafter, it was transported to Hyderabad by road.  Since May 2002, the SVK effectively used this new machine and completely recovered all the books kept in the cold storage. The wet books were kept in a vacuum chamber and subjected to a process of eliminating moisture for eight days.  After that, the dry and clean books were taken out, chemically cleaned, ironed and processed  and now shelved in the library for  use by the scholars and others.

With the successful completion of  restoration work of the flood-damaged books through Operation Salvage that started from June 11, microfilming of all the important and rare Telugu and Urdu printed materials is currently going on. This is to be simultaneously followed up by the creation of Digital Library and unified catalogues of Telugu and Urdu printed materials of the 19th and 20th centuries.  "By microfilming we preserve our printed material for nearly 400 years, in fact, in perpetuity and with digitisation the end user is facilitated with quick and less cumbersome access to the research material that is preserved on microfilms", explains C Sambi Reddy, secretary of the SVK Trust. We will use our existing staff to computerise the cataloguing and create material for the  web site at the University of Chicago. This type of activity is essentially technical in nature and requires funds which need to be raised through public donations and government funding.  Without this  digitisation, the old, but very valuable,  collection  would disintegrate and such a thing will be a loss to the culture of Indian heritage, says Sambi Reddy.

The valuable contribution made by the Sundarayya Vignana Kendram is being recognised all over the world.  The SVK is in receipt of funding from institutions like National Archives of India, New Delhi, and Raja Rammohun Roy Library in Kolkata, including some financial help from the state government of Andhra Pradesh.  For the restoration work alone a budget of Rs 1.5 crore is required and there is a need for another Rs 50 lakh for microfilming, digitisation, binding and unified cataloguing.  In addition to this, SVK has already spent Rs 25 lakh  on the cold storage rental and the retrieval of 30,000 books preserved in the + 2 degree Celsius, explains Sambi Reddy.

In the work of microfilming and digitisation,  Raja Muttaiah Research Library in Chennai is helping the SVK, besides training the staff of the SVK in database work.  The Centre for South Asian Libraries (CSAL), New York,  selected the SVK library as its associate to undertake the collection of data on printed matter in Telugu and Urdu for the global community. The SVK library was selected mainly because it had a rare collection of Telugu and Urdu books, periodicals, journals, other documents and manuscripts. Secondly, the other factor that went in favour of the library was the fact that it was able to prove its capability to safeguard its material in times of major disasters such as floods, said Dr A  Murali, member of the SVK Trust.

The SVK library is launching a drive to undertake the survey of printed material in all public libraries in the state. In this process, the volunteers of the SVK library  would also try to find out the material that was in possession of private institutions and individuals, Murali said.  The information products accruing out of CSAL’s intervention would be disseminated over the Web for research use, while the original material would be allowed to remain where it is.

At a programme organised on October 31, on the occasion of completion of the work of restoration of the books of the SVK library, a slide presentation was made explaining the entire work  taken up for the restoration of the books in the wake of flood damage.  L B Gangadhara Rao, managing trustee of the SVK Trust, and other members, including Koratala Satyanarayana, member of the Polit Bureau of the CPI(M),  appealed to the government to allocate land and render financial help to the SVK library which is shaping as a major research centre. Mementoes were presented to Marshal Oliver and Gary Bird, representatives of Cromwell and Lakshmi Narasimham and Mujeeb, both engineers.  Oliver and Gary were all praise for the workers of the SVK for grasping  and carrying out the work of restoration enthusiastically.  James Nye  of  the University of Chicago has been in touch with the SVK since the flood disaster took place more than two years ago and presently he is overseeing the restoration work.