PLANNING OF LIBRARY ACTIVITY IN GERMANY AFTER 1960’s

• Main Author: Umlauf, Konrad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Vilnius University Press 2006-12-01
• Series: Knygotyra
• Subjects: library development; federal strategy; local planning; Germany; 1960s
• Online Access: http://www.leidykla.eu/fileadmin/Knygotyra/47/KONRAD_UMLAUF.pdf

German librarians tend strongly towards writing strategic papers. As there is no single responsibility for libraries in the federal German state, it is difficult to bring together different points of viewsfrom the 16 German Bundesländer (single states), which are responsible for academic libraries, and the German local governments, which decide on their public libraries independently. In theirstrategic paper (Library 2007) German librarians wanted to find new arguments to strengthen the libraries’ position in political allocation conflicts. This article analyzes this strategic paper on the background of strategic papers about libraries since the 1960s. The years 1965 to 1975 can be considered as the golden decade of library planning in Germany. During these years several planningpapers were published, which covered more and more types of libraries and included more and more planning actors from local authorities to universities, from the German Research Council to federalministries. And these planings succeeded in an enormous upswing of libraries on the background of a remarkable economic prosperity. The article discusses the question wether the new strategic paper (Bibliothek 2007) could have similar results in spite of the current economic slack period.