Emilia Tsenova, Librarian at Prosveta 1881 Public Chitalishte in the village of Kostenets

The Glob@l Libraries – Bulgaria Program is a precondition and prerequisite for:

- building new partnerships

- meetings of librarians with local community representatives

- meetings with chitalishte and school boards

- meetings with local authorities

The implementation of successful partnerships necessitates that libraries have financial support. This will enhance their efficiency and effectiveness and improve their achievements.

For the successful partnerships with various age and multiethnic groups (mostly with the Roma minority in our village), we prepare and provide a variety of information materials.

For the opening of our library information center in February 2011 and its first anniversary in 2012, we prepared invitations and brochures and used the local press and the social networks.

We conduct ICT courses for unemployed, senior people and pensioners on a monthly basis; to date, we have trained about 50 people.

It is commendable that both young active age people and senior people from the local pensioner’s club take part in the training. We organize regular meetings and presentations for school goers. This type of communication enhances the intergenerational and multiethnic dialogue at the library. Our key priority is to see all parties satisfied, to ensure interaction and compliance with certain operation rules.

This is how we build trust, remove barriers and receive feedback from these people.

Mistrust and uncertainty are eliminated.

Solidarity can be felt.

People have the opportunity to socialize and adjust.

We assess their problems and live with them, we collect ideas.

Being professionals in what we do, we aim to make them join us and become active library and computer users searching for various types of information or exercising their newly-acquired knowledge.

We plan the services we provide according to users’ needs and demands.

Lead by our fellow citizens’ interests and needs, we try to help them, look for solutions and offer our immediate and gratuitous assistance.

We communicate with people in various ways, including non-verbal behavior – eyes, gestures, facial expression, voice, body language.

This can be felt mostly in our work with children, disabled people, pensioners or during the training courses.

We look for partners in the person of the municipality, NGOs, schools, the pensioner’s club and the media.

We participate in joint activities with them – programs, various chitalishte events.

Our work with children includes topics like: “The Harm Caused by Alcohol, Cigarettes and Drugs”, “Earth Day”, “Bulgarian Holidays”, “Christian Family Values”, etc.

We provide consultations on internet surfing.

We store and preserve books and materials donated by local intellectuals.

We strive to provide a high level of information about library activities through publications in Facebook and the local press, advertisements, brochures and invitations.

Our latest idea is to compile and publish a glossary of our local dialect in cooperation with pedagogues and part of the most senior village population. These people are valuable sources, open encyclopedias. We hope that this will be a successful endeavor, helpful and interesting for the generations, since no such collection has been published so far.

This is how our ideas and objectives share a common ground with local community members. They can draw up-to-date information on any type of issue and topic through the library and its staff. We exchange diverse information about anything our users are interested in and we improve the quality of our advisory and information services.

Whenever they visit our library or use our information center, people get relaxed and we can see satisfaction and appreciation in their eyes whenever they get good results.

Active lifelong learning skills – this is the tendency!

“When I hear, I forget. When I see, I remember. When I do, I learn.”

Confucius

It is possible and advisable that non-formal education continue as a lifelong process. It only takes will.

We are happy that we help achieve this. We cherish each reader and user who crosses the

threshold of our library. After that, they keep on talking, learning,

searching, discussing, working…