20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

Ensuring access to information, knowledge and cultural experiences 457One of the suggestions of the committee was to prepare a national policyfor public libraries in order to ensure access to knowledge and culture.Library Strategy 2010 was published in 2003, and was implementedin the Government Platform of the new Government elected in spring thefollowing year.The significance of the library will increase as a place for learningand experiences, as a conveyor of diverse knowledge and culturewith a view to mastering and organizing information accordingto user needs, as a gateway to information and to electroniccommunication within the public administration, and as part ofa learning society that practises lifelong learning, because thesignificance of the web and electronic communication is broughtout only when the contents are being used, and ultimately by howwell users have the chance and ability to utilise the information intheir lives.(Library Strategy, 2010)The Library Development Program was a follow-up of the action planof the Strategy, but also an answer to a national program for developing theregions, where libraries were brought forward as centers for information,knowledge and culture in rural areas. There were also the changing conditionsin rural areas, summer house owners wanting to spend more time in thecountryside, working and studying by telecommunicating, and the need forsmaller farms to find new livelyhoods. Consequently there were quite newexpectations concerning the capacity and quality of services in small rurallibraries with modest resources. One of the solutions to the problem, broughtout already in the Library Strategy, was centrally produced webservices.The Ministry of Education and Culture finances services produced by theNational Library for the public libraries, for example collections of materialin electronic format. The www.libraries.fi netservices of the Central Libraryfor Public Libraries (Helsinki City Library), is another example of centrallyproduced services financed by the Ministry.The Finnish Public Library Policy 2015 was launched in 2009. Thepurpose of this program is to update previous programs and policies inorder to correspond with changes in daily life and the use of the web,new ways of finding information – Google, Facebook and Twitter, just tomention a few of the new sources of information. Library users have newexpectations, and they spend more time in the library, it has become thecommon room. Many users bring their own laptop’s to benefit from thewi-fi, but obviously also for social reasons.