Thrissur District Co Operative Bank to launch e-library

Thrissur: The District Co-operative Bank here will launch an e-library making available Oxford University journals and handbooks along with 20,000 books and other publications to its subscribers at a very nominal cost next month. It will create history by becoming the first bank in the country to launch such a facility. The bank’s president Abdul Salam said here on Thursday that the e-library, named as Jawaharlal Nehru Knowledge Centre, would function at Mahatma Gandhi Trading Centre at the former head office building of the bank at Kurupam Road.

He said the bank had already handed over a representation to education minister C. Raveendranath to make available the NECRT’s digital collections of textbooks till Plus Two and question papers of the last one decade for the e-library. “If the access to this site is made available to the bank, we are planning to make it accessible to all the schools in the state free of cost. Along with schools and colleges, prison libraries will also be linked to the network,” Mr Salam said.

The subscribers can access their library on their mobiles, tablets or PCs. The bank is planning to add more books to its collection joining hands with different institutions. “The associate membership of the centre with the INFLIBNET of UGC helped us get access to the e-library facility of Oxford,” he said.