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Islamabad's libraries
Feb 2008: Even before the Model
Children Library fell victim to last year's Lal Masjid affair, public library
development in Islamabad, as in many other cities in the country, was not
something to be proud of. The capital had no public library until the 1990s, 30
years after the city's founding, when the Model Children Library, the National
Library of Pakistan and the Islamabad Public Library were opened. The mere
establishment of these public libraries, however, was no automatic guarantee of
the promotion of the reading habit among people, whether for personal enrichment
or for the more pragmatic purposes of education and research. This dismal scene
of Islamabad's public libraries could be attributed as much to the lack of
official encouragement and funding as to the lack of an organised public library
system and the absence of a library law in the country. On top of this, 2007 was
a particularly bad year for Islamabad's public libraries with these institutions
either coming under attack or public access being restricted on account of their
location and the turmoil in the city.
Hopefully, this picture is going to
change. The recent approval by the Central Development Working Party of the
Planning Commission for a new Rs60m public library in a residential sector of
the capital is a positive sign. This new library is supposed to be part of an
ambitious public library development project, the first phase of which envisages
the establishment of seven libraries in different sectors of Islamabad. As
experience shows, however, the mere establishment of public libraries is not
enough to turn them into magnets for visitors, whether physically in the library
premises or online. Unless public libraries are properly funded, maintained and
updated regularly in accordance with new concepts and ideas in library and
information science, particularly in resource-sharing and networking, they will
fail to achieve what they are supposed to, that is, help revitalise the reading
habit in people and promote nation-building. Dawn
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