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P.K. Kelkar Library

Motto in English	"From darkness, lead me to light"
Established	1960
Location	Kalyanpur, Kanpur , Uttar Pradesh , India
Campus	IIT Kanpur
Website	pkklib.iitk.ac.in

P.K. Kelkar Library (also known as Central Library) situated at the center of the serene campus of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is one of the largest libraries of India. It is named after the first and the founding director of Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Prof. P.K.Kelkar who had a major role in the planning process of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Indian Institute of Technology Bombay as well.

History

Established in the year 1964, the P.K. Kelkar library was the most crucial aspect in staging the reputation of the Indian Institute of Technologies in the mid-60s and 70s. The Indo-U.S. Program, under which the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur was established, groomed the growth of the library and made the access of foreign works more easily available to India. During the first 25 years of its existence, the library successfully made tie-up with other universities abroad such as Princeton University and Caltech and substantially improved the education graph in the subcontinent.

In the post World War 2 era, the education and employment were struggling in their worst times in India. Creation of the Indian Institute of Technologies and later establishment of P.K. Kelkar library rose to the occasion to handle this fumbling situation. The brightest minds of the country were attracted to the IITs initially because of the central presence of this mammoth library. After the death of its founding director P.K. Kelkar, the library still carries his legacy and keeps reminding his great contribution to improve the education standards in India.

Functioning

The library serves the campus community of around half a dozen thousand students. It remains open and active from 8 a.m. to 12 midnight on working days and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays excluding government gazetted holidays, and for complete 24 hours for the mid-semester examination and end-semester examination of both the semesters in a year.

The purpose of the library is to provide the student, faculty and research community of the campus with the best works on different fields along with accommodating non-educational books and novels, written by Indian and foreign authors. The library observes the inclusion of 20 new books to its catalog at the end of each month. Currently, it holds 71,468 books in total, out of which 53,782 books are for educational purposes, 12,742 are for recreational purposes, and rest are the works of the current and former faculty of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. The top of the shelf best-selling books this library holds are Machine Learning by Steve Wozniak, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Paulo Coelho, The Power of Subconscious Mind by R. Dustin, and Bharat Ek Khoj by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

Facalities

The working and supervision of the library is directly overseen by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, India (popularly known as MHRD), which funds the library on an occasional basis. Thus this library provides top state-of-the-art facilities, and the best out of any library in India.

It has an unconditional air-conditioning of every single hall 24*7 for every single day in a year. The library has a system in place to allow the current student to issue any book out of the catalog on a temporal basis completely free. It also has an attached canteen and food court which functions parallelly with the library.

The library is situated at the center of the beautiful campus of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and allows a mesmerizing view from the terrace. The fountains in front of the library are really icing on the cake and making it the most suitable place to study and completely lose out the stress.

See also

• Indian Institutes of Technology
• P.K.Kelkar
• Indian Institue of Technology Kanpur
• Indian Institue of Technology Bombay