DUSHANBE, January 3, Asia-Plus — A scientific-practical conference on state of Tajik libraries and ways of further development of them was held at the National Abulqosim Firdavsi Library in Dushanbe on the eve of the New Year holiday.
Sharif Toshev, director of the National Firdavsi Library, told Asia-Plus that the conference was dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the national library and they had presented the library’s website –
www.nlr.tj
– at the conference.
“The website is virtual home of our periodicals and we will keep the site updated with the latest news about our library and its activities,” the director said.
The National Library was established on January 1, 1933 on the basis of the Dushanbe city library and next year it was named after the great classic of Tajik-Persian literature Abulqosim Firdavsi. The library was granted a status of the national library in 1993. The National Firdavsi Library holdings have more than 3.05 million books, including 2,000 manuscripts.
As it had been reported earlier, a new building of the National Firdavsi Library is expected to have been finished by 2009.
Some 5,000 libraries with a total of some 50 million books now function in Tajikistan. Of them, 1,300 are under jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture and 2,700 are children’s libraries.
