The renovated reading room (above) of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad was thrown open on Sunday, after remaining closed for two-and-a-half months.

Education minister Partha Chatterjee (top) inaugurated the renovated reading room on Sunday evening.

The library on the ground floor of the building can now accommodate 56 readers at a time instead of 29. Twelve kiosks have been set up, the secretary of the library, Ramen Sar, said.

“We have scanned rare manuscripts which the readers can see at the kiosks. Earlier, when the manuscripts were touched with bare hands, they would get further damaged,” Sar said.

An e-cataloguing facility has also been introduced. The library staff can now track the books and manuscripts at the click of a mouse. "We have copies of newspapers published as early as in 1818. A manual search would take a lot of time. That is why the e-cataloguing facility has been started," said Sar, a professor of Bengali at Burdwan University.

The ministry of information and culture had allocated a corpus of Rs 10 crore for the renovation. The interest from the corpus was used to bear the cost of renovation.

Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, in its avatar as Bengal Academy of Literature, was born at Raja Nabakrishna Deb’s house at Sovabazar on July 24,1893. It was named as Bangiya Sahitya Parishad the next year and shifted to its present address at 243/1 Acharya Prafulla Chandra Road in 1908.

Pictures: Sanat Kr Sinha