National Library’s “overworked” employees gheraoed director-in-charge R. Ramachandran on Wednesday afternoon, after being asked to catalogue 20-25 books a day per person against the six to eight books each of them handles now.

The employees argued that they had to read a book to ascertain its subject before cataloguing and that “at times it takes an entire day to catalogue a single book”.

A reality check at a private library by Metro revealed that it takes a maximum of 30 minutes to “process” or catalogue a book. If handled more efficiently, it should not take more than 10-15 minutes.

“Even at a slow pace, an employee should not take more than half an hour to catalogue a book. It’s clear the employees in the processing section of National Library are not willing to work,” said the head of the private library.

The chairman of the library’s board of management, Omprakash Kejariwal, said that earlier, an employee used to process only two books a day. “Following our intervention and pressure tactic, the figure has risen to six-eight. But even that is far below the standard,” he said.

The employees in the processing department, who gheraoed the director-in-charge, argued that cataloguing eight books a day was a tall order, given the nature of the job.

Holding copies of Wednesday’s edition of The Telegraph and shouting slogans against the authorities, the employees threatened to stop whatever little work they are doing to protest the “humiliation at the hands of the board of management”.

“It takes time to catalogue books and the employees are doing a good job. So many things have to be done before a book is put on the shelf,” said Supriya Ganguly, who heads the processing department.

But she refused to reveal how long it takes to catalogue a book.

“The processing department is functioning with 10 employees, against the sanctioned strength of 17. Lack of enough hands is delaying the cataloguing process,” she added.

According to norms, when a book or periodical comes to the library, it goes to the processing department first for classification and preparation of catalogue cards.

“The employees have to put the name of the author, publisher, press, subject head and the number of pages on the catalogue card. Later, the books are classified and a number is assigned to each before they are put on shelves,” a library official explained.

Saibal Chakraborty, the secretary of the National Library Staff Association, said a large number of posts had been lying vacant over the past few years.

“The board should address this problem first. A large number of books in Assamese, Tamil, Marathi and Oriya are lying in neglect as there are not enough employees to catalogue them,” he said.

The library has 442 regular employees against the sanctioned strength of 699.