The library is one of the leading digital library in India with its precious collections in the area of linguistics and Indian languages and related fields. The Central library, Mysore, has its seven regional languages library located at Mysore, Pune, Solan, Patiala, Bhubaneswar, Lucknow and Guwahati.

Infrastructure

The library moved to its own premises in August 1995 and housed in an independent wing of three floors namely upper, middle and lower floor. The total carpet area of the library is 1620 square meters, and each floor measuring 540 sq. meters. The main entrance of the library is the middle floor. This floor has accommodated the Reference section, Browsing section, Circulation and Information desk, Display of new arrivals, OPAC section and the staff section. The upper floor is the library’s pride possession of the professional journals housed with current and back volumes. The lower floor, which is the backbone strength of the library, has accommodated the main collection of linguistics, Indian languages and related areas.

Information Resources

The Library built the empire of comprehensive information resources over the period of Thirty Four years acquiring reference materials, special information resources, valuable documents in linguistics and allied areas.The vast reserviour of Information materials of the CIIL Library is worth RS. 3 crores(1970-2004).

The library collection comprises print and electronic resources. The print/non-print resources include books and journals. The electronic resources include E-journals, microfiche, microfilms, slides, gramophone records, tapes, cassette tapes, and compact disk. The library also has a rich collection of manuscript information resources, which includes thesis, dissertations, and papers presented by individuals during conference, seminars and workshops. Besides it also has maps, which are restricted and unrestricted maps, photographs and charts on the development of Indian scripts and writings.

The total book collection is 80,000 and receives 400 journals, with 30,000 backvolumes on the shelf.With in the book collection of 80,000,the language wise distribution of books is shown through a pie chart. The library expenditure during the last financial year i.e., 2003-2004 is Rs. 55 lakhs. The library received the Ford Foundation grant during 1972-1975, and 1977-79 $ 48,000 and $ 40,000 which enable the library to acquire the back volumes of important professional journal in linguistics and could build up its core collection in linguistics and Indian language studies.

Library Automation

The Library in August 2003 initiated it's automation work of CIIL and Regional language centers with a compatible international software. i.e., VTLS Software ,virginia,USA. The speciality of the VTLS software is that it supports all the indian languages.A network resource sharing will be created for the CIIL and the RLC Libraries soon after the retro conversion work is over .