SCERT looking for textbooks from 1970s

Thiruvananthapuram: The State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) under the department of general education is on a search for school textbooks from the 1970s. The SCERT Archives Library has been undergoing digitisation works for the past two and a half months with the objective of compiling textbooks of class I to XII from the 1950s onwards for reference purposes.
While most of the textbooks published by the council from 1955 till the latest edition are available at the library, around 30 books on various subjects are missing and have to be collected from the public for completing the digitisation process. “The objective of the work is to record the progression of advancement in each subject over the years and to make the data accessible to the general public. This is an ideal material for scholars and researchers and is in great demand during teacher-test preparations, curriculum development and textbook preparations,” said SCERT assistant librarian Rathish.
The digitisation process is being executed by the C-DIT as per the cataloguing instructions given by the SCERT. The textbooks will be arranged class-wise with options to choose the subject and year. “Apart from locating and chronologically arranging the textbooks, our major challenge was to handle books dating back to the 50s which were brittle and had to be used with great care. If we get the 30 more books unavailable here, we can complete the process in another two months’ time. The public can access the SCERT website to get the complete list of books we require. We will even directly collect the books from the owners if they inform us through our mail id scertlibtvpm@gmail.com or contact number 9447328908 and return them as soon as we are done,” Rathish said.
The public can take a yearly membership to access the resources of the library situated at Vidyabhavan, Poojappura, which has a collection of more than 56,500 books, including 2,500 reference texts.
“The yearly membership is 300 for those interested in taking three books and 400 for those who want to check out four books while students can avail a concession. Once the work is completed, digital copies of school textbooks can be accessed from anywhere in a PDF format with added hyperlinks for reference purposes,” he said.