Punjab's public library system is thin. There are district libraries, some municipal ones, and the university collections, and rural library provision is close to nonexistent.
The significant collections are institutional: Punjabi University Patiala, Guru Nanak Dev University Amritsar, Panjab University Chandigarh, the Punjab State Archives, the Desh Bhagat Yaadgar Hall at Jalandhar, the Central Sikh Museum, and the Bhai Gurdas Library.
Village libraries have been set up by panchayats, by diaspora donors and by individuals, and a number function well. Others hold a shelf of donated textbooks and are locked.
The Panjab Digital Library has done more to make Punjabi material readable than the physical library system has.
A state with high literacy, a strong literary tradition and a serious documentation problem has almost no public reading infrastructure outside its universities.
A functioning library in a Punjab village would be among the cheapest useful things anyone could fund, and several diaspora groups have done exactly that.
The district libraries, the university collections, the state archives and the Sikh institutional libraries hold what there is. Almost none of it is catalogued online.
Village libraries have been opened by panchayats and by diaspora funding in a number of places, and their survival depends on one person continuing to run them.
A Punjabi reader looking for a book published in Punjab in the 1960s has no way of finding out where a copy is. That is a solvable problem that nobody has taken up.