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A group of 30 National Cadet Corps (NCC) student volunteers from the University of Kerala is rebuilding a historic colonial-era library in Thiruvananthapuram, antiquarian book by book and disintegrating manuscript by manuscript.
Housed in a Victorian-era building in Vanchiyoor, the Sree Chitra Thirunal Grandhasala is a rich repository of nearly 2 lakh rare books, old manuals, magazines, and other out-of-print publications that have been lost to history.
The students spend hours a day indexing, cataloguing, and preserving the rare historical treasure trove under the aegis of Young Indians, a national youth movement, in an effort to restore the 100-year-old library to its past glory.
The work is laborious and painstaking, with students recording titles, author and “accession number”, a unique sequential code assigned to individual works for making a digitalised catalogue accessible to the public, including scholars and researchers.
