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| Public Libraries in Austria |
The public libraries in Austria play an important role as a basic source of culture with a large radius of action. The following data illustrate the scope of their performance in the year 2004:
1,562 public libraries in Austria with 7,357 employees sustained 781,611 users that loaned 17.054,241 materials within a year. Almost 14 % of the Austrian population are registered users of public libraries. Those who are acquainted with the work in public libraries know that this does not convey the extent of consultations, other kind of help and social commitment, all types of work that are not quantifiable but constitute the quality of the offered services.
Statistics of the long-term development show a steady course with regard to the usage of public libraries that is often contrasted by numerous reports on the decline of the culture of reading. But the weight of these long-term observations on the usage of material is substantially higher than findings of the moment without historical perspective that arise frequently.
The Austrian public libraries have their roots on one hand in the movement of the adult education programmes, on the other hand in institutions of the church and of the worker’s movement. Both of the latter are bound to their ideologies, making the public libraries a part of the cultural clashes in the period between World War I and II. To this day lawmakers ascribe the public libraries (only the term "Volksbüchereien" exists in legal terminology) to the institutions of national education. |
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