MULTAN City News

South Punjab districts to have e-libraries

From Nadeem Shah

MULTAN: The Punjab government has planned to establish nine e-libraries in as many south Punjab districts during the current fiscal year, The News has learnt.

Officials working on the project said that the government had earmarked Rs 360.485 million for the purpose in the budget with an aim to digitalise the province. They said that a sum of Rs 12 million would be spent on establishment of e-library in Okara district, Rs 48.348 million on e-library in Sahiwal district, Rs 53.988 million on e-library in Multan district, Rs 12 million on e-library in Vehari district, Rs 52.539 million on e-library in Dera Ghazi Khan district, Rs 81.250 million on e-library in Muzaffargarh district, Rs 58.940 million on e-library in Bahawalpur district establishment and Rs 89.768 million on e-library in Rahimyar Khan district.

They said that the government was going to digitalise the education system. They said that the Intel Education Access Point would be established at the proposed places to upload textbooks, research papers, thesis, novels and books of famous authors in PDF format. They said that the Intel Content Access Point was easy to manage, had a storage capacity of one terabyte and allowed connecting to the main server using via Ethernet port, USB or 3G and 4G LTE mobile SIMs. They said that the government would appoint library specialists of BPS-18 at each e-library. Around 6,000 computer laboratories had already been established in the school, colleges and universities across the province, they said, adding that the government had recruited 300 librarians in 565 educational institutions last year. The government had also planned to establish a model library in every sports complex for providing facility of reading to the spectators and players.

The information technology officials said that the government was managing statistics of all 50 public libraries across the province and steps were being taken to convert them into the digital libraries.