Regional libraries as part of cultures services at regional level

Abstract

In the Slovak Republic, all libraries (regional, district, municipal and municipal, including branches) are considered to be public libraries. The Higher Territorial Unit (HTU) establishes a regional library as a legal entity operating in the territory of several municipalities, and also serves as a municipal library in its seat. The HTU shall designate a selected regional library that shall perform the function of a regional library with regional competences. The regional library may, in agreement with municipalities, provide library and also information services to users through a mobile library. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the position of regional public libraries through selected indicators in the time period 2009-2018 in the Slovak Republic. The data for the analysis were obtained from the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, and they were afterwards processed in MS Excel. The analysis showed that the number of regional libraries with regional competences has not changed during the analysis period. And also the total number of regional libraries of the analysed time period did not change. We see changes in the funding of public libraries. Transfers of HTU created, on average, 54% on total transfers of public libraries and it represented, on average, 10.8 thous.€.