In 2009, a Public Libraries Act was adopted. The law regulates the conditions that public libraries need to meet, their financing, their governance and interaction in a national network. Unified standards for the work of the libraries and for the services they provide were introduced. The National Library Council of the Ministry of Culture should prepare strategies for the development of library activities, conservation measures for funds and for civic access to cultural heritage.
A rich library infrastructure has been created and operates in the country. According to the information provided by the Ministry of Culture, there are 27 libraries operating in the regional centres at the regional level. Three thousand libraries within a chitalishte (a typical Bulgarian public institution with several cultural functions at once) are building the network of public libraries in Bulgaria. There are also libraries in universities, scientific units, and schools. As of October 2012, there are at least 3 500 libraries in the country.
Global Libraries – Bulgaria (Bulgarian Libraries: A Place for Access to Information and Communication for Everyone) is a support program for the libraries in Bulgaria at the Ministry of Culture. In 2016, BGN 300,000 was allocated to it. This is the state’s share of the Bill and Melinda Gates programme.
An important project for digitalisation in Bulgaria was launched in 2009: NALIS Foundation’s National Academic Library Information System. The NALIS Union Catalogue is unique for Bulgaria: “the catalogue allows searching through a single platform and permits retrieving titles among nearly 3.6 million bibliographic records from the electronic catalogues of over 45 libraries in Bulgaria: it also grants access to full-text documents which are integrated into it thorough the NALIS repository. All this makes it the National catalogue of Bulgaria.” (for 2018)
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