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Reading has been a favorite pastime to me from my childhood. That included visiting the local library and spending time there reading. I did this during my childhood in India and even now when I am working in the USA.
While I can complain about how there are too few libraries and even fewer well-maintained libraries in India for a long time, I want to write about what is good in the USA and what India can start doing. First let me put down what I like with libraries in USA
- Libraries in the USA are spacious and bright with both natural and artificial light. ● Most of the library is easily accessible for everyone and books are well maintained. ● Anyone in that city limits can walk in and check out any available book. ● Online access for books catalog with availability and option to reserve books.
○ If a book is not available in that city library, then the library will bring one for us if available in a nearby library.
- Option to not just reserve physical books, but also reserve ebooks and even audiobooks. ● Special space for toddlers with tens of thousands of books and activities to engage them everyday.
- They use technology to prevent book theft and also make it easy for users to better use the library.
There are so many good things I can write about libraries in the USA. Certainly, I never imagined the Library could be so good before I came here.
What India should start doing
- Increase the number of libraries and make sure they have ample space. ● Make sure they are bright with light.
- Encourage content creators to create more books for all generations especially for toddlers. Once a toddler gets into the habit of reading books, then he/she will carry that forward for the rest of their life.
These are the first steps to improve our libraries, more needs to be done. Let’s not confine good libraries to just metro cities. They need to be available for every village. We need to understand that, library is not a place to kill time but a place to spend time.
Improving libraries is beneficial to creativity and overall well being of citizens of the country, thereby it greatly benefits the country. This will even help the economy as this will lead to an explosion of quality content and thereby affect the well being of everyone involved from content creators to readers in a positive way. New stories will take birth in our country which saw masterpieces like Ramayana and Mahabharata. We can also save a lot of our heritage through the stories told with Indian lens and pass them to the next generations.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint