The Government College of Teacher Education, Thvananthapuram, Kerala State, India was established in 1911. The normal trend in the college in those days was to import books from England and America both for reference and for drawing new ideas emanating on pedagogy. This practice continued until Indian independence. Though over the years the number of books in the library grew, no additional rooms were set up. The practical approach was to preserve new books regularly issued to students in good book shelves and dump very old books that are not issued to students in discarded shelves.

In 1992, when the Principal Investigator, Dr.Chandrasekharan Praveen was pursuing a teaching degree, in the college, he noticed a couple of good very old books. But as per existing rules very old books were not issued to students. The investigator’s curiosity was abated in 2008 when he was appointed as a faculty of the same college. Then began an earnest exploration of the collection of antique books in the one hundred year old college library. Though the investigator could find several invaluable content in the old books, attack by book mites and the leaking ceiling of the library had already destroyed several books. So on behalf of the college, a proposal was submitted to the UGC for renovation of the library and for preservation of the antique books under the scheme for funding heritage colleges. This proposal however did not receive any funds.

So in 2015, during the fag end of his career, the investigator submitted his first and only research proposal to the University Grants Commission to selectively digitize the antique books content of the century old Government College of Teacher Education, Thiruvananthapuram. This received a favourable response even though the amount sanctioned was only one fourth of the original proposed.