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Momentous and numerous tasks have been assigned by the citizens of the Tuzla Canton to their major Library:
- the duties of the municipal public
library which point our work toward serving the information needs of Tuzla
City inhabitants of all ages and backgrounds;
- the jobs of the central library in the network of school and public
libraries in the Tuzla Canton municipalities;
- the tasks of an university library which determine our role in the
library network of the Tuzla University;
- the tasks of preserving, processing and providing access to the deposit
copy of materials printed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which stress the
importance of contribution that we are giving as a cantonal library to the
re-construction of the country's library and information system.
Bearing in mind that only our Users are eligible to judge how good we are in completing our tasks, the Public and University Library "Derviš Sušić" Tuzla started a series of development projects aimed to improve some segments of its complex organism and give them a form which will meet the expectations of our Users.
As a top priority we are planning to use some 500 square meters of library space for establishing a reading room intended primarily for students and teachers from the Tuzla University. Reading room will be equipped with our enlarged and renovated reference collections (encyclopaedias, dictionaries, bibliographic databases etc.) and with our enriched scientific resources, especially periodicals. This equipment will also involve computer network with free access to the Internet for our users. Complementary to this project is our systematical work on collection development, primarily focused on basic titles in subjects and fields studied at the Tuzla University.
We intend to support more decisively the creative affirmation of the young authors through our educational, promotional and publishing programs, and to bring these programs closer to the interests of young people. In these activities, we will be even more open to the partnership with similar institutions and organizations in the country, and especially from abroad. We expect to animate non-governmental organizations and foreign embassies for cooperation on projects such as establishment of the debate club or organization of a series of seminars that will focus on the questions of human rights and democratic process in former Yugoslavia.
The next project we enter upon with great attention and expectation is intended to the youngest users and deals with a substantial rearrangement of our children department. I left it for the end of this list, just to emphasize its urgency - we all know that children have no time to wait for their toy collections, corner for storytelling, room for computer workshops...
In order to provide support for these projects we held several meetings with local authorities. In future months, we plan to establish contact with a number of non-governmental organizations, foreign embassies and various philanthropic funds from which we hope to obtain material support and help with training of our staff.
One of the reasons why we decided on starting our website at this very moment was our intention to take an advantage of the Internet for speaking a word about the Library's future plans. We hope we will be able to develop the site by adding the appropriate contents. We also hope that its usefulness will grow together with the number of computers from which our users can access it, either from within the Library or from their schools, working places and homes.
Enisa Žunić,
Director
Tuzla, 2000