Daniel Poor Memorial Library in Madurai

Daniel Poor was one of the pioneer missionaries of the American Board who started the American Ceylon Mission in Jaffna in 1816. He was also one of the founders for the American Madura Mission established in Madurai (then Madura) in 1835. Samuel A Morman, the granddaughter of Dr. Daniel Poor, was the key person to build the library building by donating $25,000 to the American Board of Missionaries on January 26, 1926.[1] Between 1914 and 1920, J. A. Sanders worked as its first librarian, establishing the college library. This building was originally planned for a ground floor that would house a stack room for about 50,000 volumes, a small museum, and a teacher's room. The first floor was to house a library study room and two lecture rooms. Presently this building houses a stack room, a reference section, a reading room, technical section and a computerized student access catalog system. Stack room at the library houses more than 76,000 volumes.[2]

“Provides services to a variety of clientele diverse in skills, expectations and creates an atmosphere of trust, support and encouragement among all members in the American College”.

“To provide the collections, services and physical environment to satisfy intellectual curiosity and information needs of the users in the American College”.

The first floor houses the current periodicals, back volumes of periodicals, and a small rare book collection. The only structural addition in the building is the mezzanine floor built during 1987–1988. This facility doubled the space for shelving books and helped expand the reading room space, Internet Browsing Center, Talking Book Library for Visually Challenged Students, Readers' Club, Fully Wi-Fi enabled and CCTV protected.

Famous visitors to the DPM Library include
Rabindranath Tagore,
Robert A. Millikan,(Robert A. Millikan was an American experimental physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for his measurement of the elementary electronic charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect)
S.R. Ranganathan,
Khan Sahib,
C. N. Annadurai,
V.V. Giri,
M. Karunanithi,
Poet Subramaniya Bharati and many others....

A palm leaf manuscript with ancient Tamil text in DPM

The library boast's rare antiques, archaeological artifacts and ancient coins of Pandyan Dynasty, Cholas as well. Many ancient palm leaf script copies like Tiruvacakam, Manimekalai etc. are preserved here under rare archives section.[3]

Important letter correspondence between the Indian Government and The American Missionaries are preserved here, wood carvings from Nayak period, five metal bronze statues of Vishnu and other Hindu gods, Indonesian wood carvings and wooden statues dated more than 1000 years etc. are few among the collection.[4]

Proper documentation of all this collection is not done and many of the artifacts seems to mishandled and some are missing.[5]

• Daniel Poor
• American College, Madurai