Origins of People's Library Movement in Kerala

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The paper gives a bird’s eye view of the history of a highly specialized and efficient service with recorded information, organized and managed by the people that existed in ancient Kerala. This service formed part of the Gurukula System of education. The great scholars molded their family situations in a way in which it would blend with teaching learning process which they are to undertake. This resulted in hereditary specialization by families in specific subject fields. These scholar houses possessed great wealth of manuscripts on their topic of specialization. Even though specialized; they were open to all and are to be considered as oldest public libraries. Different collections of various subjects that existed in a region; together formed a network without itself being aware of it. As these collections are managed by scholars from concerned fields people got highly specialized information service. But later these libraries were destroyed by long periods of war between local rulers and resultant economic and political instability. The paper explains how the influence of this tradition and the requirements of the educational, social and political reform movements of the later half of the Nineteenth Century resulted in the establishment of thousands of small libraries in villages that gave birth to a unique people's library movement in Kerala.

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Paperlandia^{edición DICOM}