Lal Bahadur Chouhan's Page

TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY CENTRAL LIBRARYINTRODUCTION
Tribhuvan University Central Library (TUCL) was established along with the University in 1959. It began with a collection of 1200 volumes of books. Now, the collection exceeds 3,25,000 volumes of books. In addition, there are more than 25000 back volumes of periodicals. Over 500 titles of periodicals are received every year on subscription or as gifts. Many philanthropists and bibliophiles have contributed this library to grow into its present size. It is the largest library in the Kingdom in terms of collection, services and the number of members.
Even though TUCL is an academic library established to support the teaching, study and research programmes of the university, it has extended its services beyond the limit of the university campus. Apparently, having no public libraries in the valley and respecting the need and sentiments of all the concerned, the TUCL started rendering services by offering memberships to the general public as well as to the foreigners residing in Nepal.
And in addition, the library also serves the government ministries & foreign diplomatic missions. Therefore, it functions also as a public library and to some extent as a National library.
Since 1965, the TUCL has also been working as the Depository Library in Nepal for the United Nations Organization and other International Organizations publications. A separate section UN Depository Collection section containing more that 25,000 volumes has been set up to house the publications received from these organizations.
Since the beginning of January 2000, the library has also started functioning as the ISBN National Agency in Nepal to distribute International Standard Book Numbers for the books published in Nepal.
In addition to the usual Services, i.e., books circulation, Reference service and Special collections services, the TUCL also brings out Publications relevant to various subjects.
The library has maintained the traditional system of card catalogues for searching the materials. But in addition to this, since 1995, it has been providing in-house computer database searching facilities through OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) computer terminals to search the existing records of the library. The work of retrospective conversion of the card catalogues into computer records has yet to be done.