The library in Liberec will celebrate 25 years since its establishment, preparing discussions and other events

Liberec – The Regional Scientific Library in Liberec will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the opening of its twelve-story building made of glass and metal, known as the Building of Reconciliation, this autumn. It is preparing discussions with well-known people and other events. Even after 25 years, it is clear that it was a timeless building, said library director Dana Petrýdesová today to ČTK. The arrangement of the library is almost the same as it was at its opening on November 9, 2000.

"As far as I remember, it has remained the same. I joined the library only after it was built. I know there were some minor changes here, but in the end, it turned out that this setup works well," said Petrýdesová.

If she had been involved in the project's preparation back then, the only thing she would have changed would be the number of sockets. "It's a small detail, but students are missing a lot of sockets throughout the building, so over the course of 25 years we have been constantly adding new electrical sockets. Currently, with the construction of the new library building, a socket is automatically planned for almost every meter," she stated.

Thanks to the timelessness of the building, they can continuously improve the services offered, according to her. "We have built closed study rooms, individual boxes, and we have introduced self-service borrowing. We now have a pickup box that our visitors can use even when the library is closed. What we are thinking about is an automatic return box, where visitors can return documents on a conveyor belt that will already sort the documents according to the department. But we are still in the phase of vision here," she added.

The building has a variable use and is not only for borrowing books; the library offers up to 1500 programs and cultural and social events a year.

The director described the Liberec library as a building with a story. The building is unique in that it combines a library and a modern Jewish synagogue under one roof. In an original way, it expresses the specific history of the place where it stands. At this location before World War II stood one of the largest synagogues in Central Europe, which was burned down by the Nazis during the Night of Broken Glass in 1938.

Additionally, the library as an institution stands on the foundations of Czech and German librarianship in Liberec. It owns the collections of the former Czech and former German libraries that existed in Liberec in the first half of the last century. Symbolically, it expresses the reconciliation of three cultures and nationalities that lived alongside each other in the Liberec region before World War II and whose coexistence was subjected to trials, tragedies, and historical upheavals.

The construction of the Building of Reconciliation, including its furnishing, cost almost 520 million crowns. The Czech state, cross-border grant funds, and the governments of Germany and Switzerland contributed to it. The project was sponsored by then Czech President Václav Havel and former German President Roman Herzog. In 2001, the library received the title Building of the Year.