Overview

In the introduction to this book. Mohanraj deals with a survey of the history of library movement our country from its beginning to modern times and takes a peep into the development of school library movement in the world and in India. Having said this, he rightly points out that those who say that the library is an institution that we inherited from the British are ignorant of our library heritage and those who refuse to acknowledge the contribution of the West to our library movement are blind to reality. Few books on school library have dealt with topics that the author discusses in this book. Unlike most books on school library, the author focuses primarily on the educational aspect of the school library. While advocating the need for reforming the method of teaching in India schools, he calls for encouraging the spirit of research in school children. As such, he advocates library-centred teaching and says the school library should be seen as an extension of the classroom. Two important topics that Mohanraj discusses are library ethics and discipline in the school library. School librarians seldom think of the importance of teaching children library ethic. This book gives library ethic the importance it deserves and also deals with the methods of instilling it in children. The author, it is obvious, favours teaching library ethics unobtrusively when children look for source books in connection with research or visit for borrowing books for reading at home and not as a subject per se. Regarding maintenance of discipline, he says the ambience of formality prevailing in classrooms considerably helps teachers in maintaining discipline. This cannot be expected in the school library where the atmosphere is necessarily very informal. In addition to that, unlike teachers, the school librarian cannot afford to be a strict disciplinarian; he has to be a friend and guide. As a result, maintenance of discipline in the school library is an onerous task. Technical matters are confined to one chapter and another chapter is devoted to infrastructure. This is the only book on school library that deals with children's literature in detail and points out the need for a library in pre-schools. Many librarians may raise eyebrows when the author makes out a case for having toys in pre-school and primary school libraries. This book, thus, presents several novel ideas not usually founds in books on school library.

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A veteran Librarian, Mohanraj had been working as an academic librarian for thirty-eight years, from 1951 to 1989. On completion of his professional studies he was given the responsibility of modernizing the presidency College (Chennai) Library by the state government. After that he was transferred to the Law College (Chennai) library, the modernization of which was initiated by him. He resigned from government service to join The Lawrence School (Lovedale) as librarian from where he superannuated in 1989. After that he settled in Only, Tamilnadu and had been on the managing committee of the Nilgiri Library until he left for the U.S. He has to his credit eleven books and several papers on library services. These were published in the Herald of Library Science, the Journal of Indian, the Primary Teacher, The Hindu (Education Column), the Deccan Herald, the Indian Express and the Journal of the Kerala Granthasala Prasthanam (in Malayalam). His earlier two books, Library Services for Children and The Multifaceted Librarian were brought out by Ess Ess Publications, New Delhi and his book, School Library in Malayalam was published by the Kerala Bhasha Institute, Thiruvananthanpuram. Mohanraj had presented papers on school library service at the seminar sponsored by the All India Public School Masters' Conference (Lovedale), the British Council (Chennai) and National Seminar on School Libraries (Thiruvananthapuram).

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