Libraries will go underground

Libraries will go underground, literally, otherwise, it is known that in our country people read less and less. Travelers transiting the Piaţa Unirii metro station will have at their disposal a shelf full of books, respectively an initial book collection, which will be made available by the Bucharest Metropolitan Library and the National Library of Romania. The books can be consulted on the spot or they can be borrowed at home, the condition being that they are brought back or replaced with other volumes, BMB informs. The works must have no physical damage, such as missing parts of the work, destroyed pages, no chemical or biochemical damage, and must not be foreign publications with little informational and documentary value. Initiated by the National Library of Romania, the "Metro Library" pilot project, which is to be extended to other metro stations, was launched on the National Reading Day. The objective of the initiative is to stimulate interest in reading and facilitate access to culture for as many people as possible, offering access to a varied range of books, directly in metro stations. The General Manager of the Bucharest Metropolitan Library, Ramona Mezei stated: "Practically, starting today, the Bucharest Metropolitan Library will go, daily, by metro, through the books that travelers will carry with them, from station to station, to their own homes The cultural project «Metro Library» is an extraordinary initiative, in the context in which research from Nielsen Book Data points out that Generation Z prefers printed books, representing 80% of purchases from November 2021 to 2022. Libraries also report an increase in users of generation Z who prefer silence, at the expense of noisy cafes. In Great Britain, visits to the library increased by 71%. Through such initiatives, we can only hope that, one day, in Romania too we will enjoy such percentages". The Bucharest Metropolitan Library, through the Culture, Education, Tourism Directorate of the Bucharest City Hall, is a partner, along with Metrorex, in this project. Metrorex will provide the necessary space for storing books, while the Bucharest Metropolitan Library and the National Library of Romania will contribute with literary resources. Recent statistics published by the National Institute of Statistics indicate that approximately 11.1 million Romanians declared that they had not read a book in the last year.