Background History of the Library

The Cheena Bhavana Library has one of the most valuable collections in Visva-Bharati. Although officially the Cheena Bhavana library along with the Bhavana was opened in 1937, the acquisition of books and other documents had started earlier. 

Cheena Bhavana Library has connected with the MHRD Wi-Fi. Library has 04 PCs, 01 printers, one Scanner for its Library and cloud based Library Management Software Koha (Unicode Web compliant)is being used for automating the library activity and services.

Library Collection

Cheena Bhavana Library has a good collection of more than 46,200 books in its library, along with 5,000 books received as gifts from different sources. The library has around 200 users and a daily transaction of 30 books.

• Books: 46200 (approx.)

• CD/DVD-ROMs: 450 +

• Journals: 13 (Banyue Tan, Beijing Review, China Journal, China Report, China Today, China Quarterly, Duzhe, Issues and Studies, Liao Wang, Qui Shi, Renmin Ribao Index, Social Sciences in China, and Xinhua Wenzhai).

• Newspapers: 02 (Anandbazar & Statesman)

Library Services

• New Arrivals

• Lending Service

• Reference Service

• On-line Public Access Catalogue

• Book Reservation

• Bibliographic Services

• Reprographic Services

• Inter Library Loan Services through different Libraries

• Wi-Fi facilities within department

• Access of E-Journals

• Internet Searching & Browsing

• Accessing 120 TV channels directly from China

Foreign Collaboration

Cheena Bhavana Library has signed MOA (Memorandum of Agreement) with Shanghai Library, People’s Republic of China on November 03, 2016 for three years. Through this MOA, Shanghai Library will provide 500 copies of books in the 1st year of MOA and subsequently 100 books per year. This will be of great help in collection and development of Cheena Bhavana Library, Library resource sharing would be possible for library catalogue database, books, journals, etc., This MOA between the two libraries possesses important significance for India-China educational exchanges.

Resources/Collections of the Library (including Special Collection, Rare Collection, and Digitized Collection): 

Among the rare books in this library are the Hwang-Chi’ing Ching-Chiai, a collection of Commentaries of Chinese Canons of the Chi’ing Dynasty (1644-1910 A.D.), Tzu-Chih Tunga-Chien, the Chinese government Annuals, from the Chou Dynasty to the Sund dynasty (771 B.S-960 A.D), 24 different editions of the Chinese Tripitaka. The Library has also a special collections of Chinese Encyclopaedia and the very important and valuable collection of the Chinese Budhhist scriptures titled Tripitakas in Sanskrit and Ts’ang-ching in Chinese. In addition, the earlier complete set of the Tibetan Budhhist Tripataka purchased by Tagore.

Library Users

Students, Research Scholars, Teachers, Staffs of Visva-Bharati are the normal users of Library. Outsiders can use this library with special permission.

Visva-Bharati Library Network: The library is part of the Visva-Bharati Library Network and is connected to the Central Library through the campus-wide MHRD Wifi. The services that are available to the users through this network are:

1. Union catalogue of documents of all libraries in the network (WebOPAC: https://vbu-opac.kohacloud.in/),

2. Integrated automation through Koha software,

3. Access to digital, electronic resources like online journals & databases, e-books, digitised books, theses

4. Information services like Newspaper Clipping, CAS, Scholarship update, New Arrivals, Institutional Repository consisting of syllabuses and question papers, IT-enabled services like access to plagiarism detection software (Drillbit: https://www.drillbitplagiarism.com/ ), Single Window Search Engine (Discovery Service: https://vbu-opac.kohacloud.in/), Web of Science, JGate+, EndNote etc.

5. Library Website: Gateway to everything about the Library: https://vblibrarynetwork.in/index.php

6. Inter – Library Loan System (DELNET)

7. Braille Library Service

8. Network e-Newsletter

Library Hours

All days except weekly holiday: 9.30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Weekly Holiday:

Wednesday and Sunday