St. Stephen’s College Library
St. Stephen’s College Library is as old as the College itself. Established in the year 1881 and moved to the current location in the year 1941, it has a rich history of its own. What started in a small room with one book cabinet and a few books as its collection in the year 1881, has now grown to be a fully automated and air-conditioned Library with two full-fledged wings known as the Old wing and the New wing, and has a collection of more than one lakh books. The College Library stands today with a total covered area of 993.10 sq. mtrs. The Library building is spacious with large reading rooms, stack areas and space for various other activities. The building is aesthetically constructed, showcasing the themes and designs borrowed from the Moghul architecture.
The Library is automated using Troodon 5.5 software. The OPAC helps the users to search through vast collection of documents.
Reading Room: The Library reading room has a total seating capacity of 222. The Library is visited by approximately 200 to 300 users every day and the average number of logins to OPAC stands at 200 per day.
Textbook Section: The Library has a separate textbook section containing multiple copies of textbooks for different courses offered by the college. It caters to the growing demand from the Library users for these books.
Rare Book Collection: The Library has more than 7000 books in the rare book section. These books are useful source of information for study and research. They can be searched using OPAC. The Library also has a rare collection of more than 4000 Persian books. Some of these books are rare and not available in any other library. Students from various institutions visit the Library to consult these rare books.
Besides these, the Library collection contains various Encyclopedias, Gazetteers, Almanacs, Dictionaries and other Reference Books.
Video Library: A separate video-library section is developed where students and faculty members can watch videos, films and documentaries on various topics such as arts, history, culture, science etc. Users are allowed to issue CDs, DVDs and VHSs from the Library collection.
Computer Section: The Computer and Internet Area for Research provides Internet and Intranet facility to the users for their research needs.
Faculty Room: A separate room has been allocated for the faculty members with reading space and internet, scanning and xeroxing facility. Separate lockers are also provided for faculty members in the Library.
Archives: The College Archives possesses a rich collection of historical documents and photographs. It also contains rare archival materials such as photographic slides, videos, books, maps, artifacts, published material like College Journals etc. The rarest collection of the Library is the TORAH Scroll which is almost 250 years old.
Scanning Division: The latest addition to the College Library is the Scanning Division containing the Zeutschel OS 12002 scanner and AVISION Scanner. The scanning division focuses to meet all the digitization needs of the College inhouse.
Institutional Repository: The Library has developed an Institutional Repository which is available over Local Area Network.
Enabling Unit: The enabling unit of the Library is a separate facility designed for the visually challenged and differently abled students. It is equipped with Desktop computers with multimedia speakers, Headphones, LEX scanner and JAWS screen reading software, besides which various other scanners like Horizon, Sara CE, HP Scanner, Zoom Ex Scanner etc. are available in this section. The Library staff helps the students by scanning and providing the soft copies of the reading material to the students. The VI students are issued Angel e-book readers and MP3 recorders by the Library. The Library also contains laptops with Jaws software. The Saksham E-10 recorder and the KIBO XS scanner are the latest additions to this section.
E-Resources: The Library is a member of NLIST, which is jointly executed by E-Shodh Sindhu Consortium, Inflibnet and INDEST-AICTE Consortium, IIT Delhi. Besides NLIST, the Library also has access to e-resources through Delhi University Library System and E-Shodh Sindhu of UGC. The Library users have access to more than 126 databases, millions of e-books and more than 30,000 e-journals through NLIST, Delhi University Library System and E-Shodh Sindhu of UGC.
The Library also has separate rooms for Acquisition of Books, Journals and Cataloguing.
In order to accelerate research activities, the Library provides various services to its users namely: Reference Service, Journals Table of Content Alert, Literature Search, Selective Dissemination of Information, Bibliography Service, Current Awareness Service, Information Literacy, Books Reservation, CDs/DVDs lending, Inter-Library Loan facility through DELNET, Help Desk facility.
Library Timings:
During Weekdays the Library remains open from 8.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.
On Saturdays the Library remains open from 8.30 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.
During Exam Days the Library remains open from 8.30 a.m. to 7.00 p.m.
Outreach during Pandemic Period
During the pandemic, the library users were provided remote access to millions of e-resources offered by the College Library through NLIST, Delhi University Library System and UGC-E-Shodh Sindhu. User queries were resolved through e-mails and their informational demands were met by delivery of information through e-mails and other social media like whatsapp. User memberships were regularly renewed and they were sent reminders and activation codes from time to time to ensure continuous flow of information and exhaustive use of library resources.