National Library of Albania

National Library of Albania ( main entrance )

The National Library of Albania (Albanian Biblioteka Kombëtare e Shqipërisë ) in Tirana is the central scientific library of Albania.

History

It was founded on July 10, 1920. The basis for this was the foundation of komisia Letrare Shqipe, an Albanian- Austrian club which in Shkodra was active as early as 1917. Shortly after the inauguration, 1922, the National Library had its headquarters in the Ministry of Education in Tirana. At that time she had a collection of around 600 works. Until that time, there was an increase of about 150 titles a year, ten years later, there were on average 250 Until 1944 next Tirana and Shkodra and Korca were important publishing and printing sites.

The National Library of Albania is today housed in the Palace of Culture on Skanderbeg Square. It is the most important library in the country and has more than 1.1 million copies. The current stock growing at an average of around 20,000 library materials per year. The mission of the National Library consists of the development of resources and making them available to readers and interested parties.

Digital Library

The digitized catalog of the National Library of Albania is a catalog based on databases of digitized maps and is accessible via the Web or via local disk. The digitization began in 1994. The online catalog of the National Library of Albania contains bibliographic records such as books, articles, maps, theses, journals and audiovisual media, but also specific records of Albanian-language publications that have been cataloged later.

This catalog also contains digital images of manuscripts, antiquarian books and maps from the 16th to the 18th century. The current object of digitized materials was indexed with the Universal Decimal Classification. The project, which was launched in late 1997, is to digitize the card catalog of the Albanological balkanologischen and Special Collections.