Madurai :

A simple technique used in small-scale textile shops paved the way for the librarians of Lady Doak College to classify their huge collection of books with ease.

Inspired by the way shopkeepers mark the prices of products using colourful stickers, the J X Miller Library started a unique method called ‘Rainbow Classification’. In this method, the staff paste colourful stickers on the spine of the books making their task easier when it comes to sorting and arranging the books.

J X Miller library is as old as the college itself which was established in 1948 by Katie Wilcox, an American missionary in Madurai region. There are 12 departmental libraries and 12 special libraries with thousands of books and journals in each. Apart from these, the college is also maintaining an archive on the history of the college and its founder.

S Sangaranachiar, library director said that they used to take a whole day during weekend to complete the laborious task of arranging books, which has now reduced to an hour everyday. “We were looking for some classification methods. The idea struck us in a textiles shop where a salesman told that they use the stickers to mark the prices. We ordered special stickers with single and double colours from a merchant in the city and pasted specific coloured stickers on specific books,” she said. The system is more than a decade old and has yielded good results too, the staff said.

After the system was implemented, the library staff were able to arrange the books in lesser time and could retrieve them quicker. “After introducing this method, we could track the books, which were misplaced by the students intentionally or unintentionally,” Sangaranachiar pointed out. The intentional misplacing is done by the students if they want to hide a book for later retrieval. “At the end of the day, we just give a casual screening of the racks and such hidden books could be spotted because they don’t match the specific colour code of the section. Tracking them with numbers or alpha-numerical would be slightly tougher and time consuming too,” one of the library staff said.

Another novel initiative undertaken by the library for its students is the Library Service Programme. As Part V stream of the collegiate education, the library offers a 120-hour library service course in which 20 hours goes in theory sessions while 100 hours are set aside for fieldworks.

Fieldworks include visiting village libraries and helping out the panchayats in library management. The students also organise story telling sessions for children in the villages and take a children’s library along during their visits. They also visit the district library to learn the nuances of maintaining a library. In addition to these, the library also offers an elective paper called Basics of Library and Information Services. It also organises lectures on plagiarism so that students don’t copy the works of authors for their assignments.

V Aparna and J Ruth Roobella, the final year students from English department, said that their library is more than the collection of books. “Apart from utilising the services of the library, we also get to learn a lot on library science too. The most attractive part is the rainbow system used in the classification of the books,” Aparna said.

source: http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Madurai> Books / TNN / December 13th, 2013