Sofia City library

Historical perspective on the establishment, building, and growth of the Sofia Library The collecting of literature on urban planning, economics, accounting, dictionaries, reference, and other works supporting municipal operations started with the declaration of Sofia as the capital and the foundation of the Sofia Municipality.

In the pages of the magazine “Bulgarian Collection” in 1885, there was a proposal to “take the initiative in a legislative order and lay the foundations and arrange for a municipal library with a reading room in each town and village, which will help a lot and in many ways not only for the masses, but also for our literature.” It is specified that a minimal sum should be paid for the municipal library in the municipal budgets on an annual basis.

The earliest documented evidence regarding the Sofia Municipal Library, according to Dimitar Mishev, goes back to 1897, when a committee was created to audit the municipality. After going through all of the departments in the municipality, the commission members “came upon mounds of volumes.” These were the books from the library. The committee discovered them stacked up, uninvented, and unorganized, and “in order to locate a book, all the mounds of volumes had to be investigated.” According to the statement issued by the commission on this occasion, the library was recognized as a municipal library, the volumes of which were to be accessed by the inhabitants.

The Sofia City Library is said to have been founded on October 24, 1928. A municipal museum was founded with the notification order of the then-mayor, Vladimir Vazov, and three departments: museum, library, and archive. The official launch occurred in the summer of 1929 at a room at 9 Slaveykov Square. At the time, the library’s book fund totaled 5311 volumes. Kosta Valev, the curator of the municipal library and museum, is the first director. The library has been a legally autonomous institution of the Sofia Municipality since 1995.

Georgi Belchev was the Sofia Library’s director from July 18, 1998 until July 20, 2008. With his appointment comes the start of his strategic program: the transformation of the library into a modern cultural and information institute, as well as a factor in the development of civil society in our country, combining interdisciplinarity in content and interactivity in form and activities. Thus, the universal library funds (approximately 1,000,000 library units) currently housed in the Sofia Library and its branches provide library services to thousands of Sofia residents, while the established computer network and Internet provide access to bibliographic, full-text, and administrative Bulgarian and foreign databases.

The addition of automatic uniform registration of readers in the Central Library and its branches makes it even easier to use. Its position as a regional cultural institution (from July 1, 2000) provides it the authority and responsibility to offer methodological and organizational help to all libraries in the Sofia area. The Sofia Library maintains relations with foundations, related cultural institutions, foreign cultural and scientific centers, cultural services of foreign embassies in Bulgaria, and develops intensive international activity – through information exchange, joint participation in projects under European programs, and qualification of specialists with related libraries. chance for ongoing replenishment and enrichment of the fund of foreign language reading rooms

Cultural ties with Bulgarians from the Western suburbs, as well as systematic assistance for the library of the Bulgarian Cultural Center in Dimitrovgrad, Yugoslavia, play an essential role in the library’s operation. The work with children has a significant position in the Sofia Library’s cultural activities. To attract an increasing number of young readers, the specialist children’s and youth department works on current programs in a variety of formats, going beyond its primarily library function. The library’s publishing activity has been restarted with the children’s educational magazine with a religious focus “Christian in the New Century” and the published bibliographies on its website.

Mihail Belchev is the library’s director from July 28, 2008 until December 10, 2013. Julia Tsinzova took over as director of the library on December 10, 2013.