The 'Spotlight on Community Libraries' project was born out of a need to highlight the various community libraries in function across India, and to document their diverse processes, ideologies, goals and significance. Community libraries have emerged out of a deep felt need for libraries that are free for all and held in collective ownership by the marginalised communities in an increasingly capitalistic and caste driven society.

In a country like India, given the steep dualism and inequalities between the privileged castes and the underprivileged that are starkly visible, the importance of community libraries is immense. Open libraries act as catalysts in empowering the children from disadvantaged communities growing up with a learning gap by unequal access to technology and hold significant symbolic value for the marginalised. The aim of this project is to underline the need for the systematic documentation of free community libraries by creating easy to emulate, adapt and use templates on How-to-do for the network of free libraries in India like Free Libraries Network.

This project follows the work of Haadibadi Community Library located in Roopena Agrahara, Bangalore. The project is supported by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan.

Haadibadi Community Library is looking forward to documenting your experience of having access - or the lack of it - to libraries. Please take these few minutes in helping us understand, document and collect the details of the library in our lives. We will be using your responses to create a map of library experiences and sharing it as an open resource in different forms. The following report is still a work in progress evolving in accordance with the data being collected across India with focus on Karnataka. To participate in the 2 minutes survey click here .

What the Survey show us