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The article is provoked by the section Duel in Livenews.bg where it was raised an interesting question for ballot: more money for libraries or for sport. The author considers a number of issues related to the current state of public libraries in Bulgaria, the dimensions of the crisis in their services, personnel, funds, financing, etc. The emphasis is placed on the discrepancy between current attitudes of the younger generation, the marginalization of large groups, and the development of the knowledge economy. For example the main question in many publications is how the libraries can surmount the effects of chalga-culture or the mall-culture, which are the choice for majority of the younger population in the country. But essentially, the problem refers to the future of the libraries as active organizations in the information economy. It is undisputed that the use of ICT is growing both in different organizations (governmental institutions, educational institutions, businesses...) and in households. It could be argued that more Bulgarians already personalize their information space according to their individual needs. More importantly, the expectations of the younger generation are about a library founded on ICT and Internet. These expectations are not related directly to the effects of chalga- and mall-culture, rather with the level of technological development of libraries and technological preferences of many Bulgarians. Are the libraries ready for this challenge? The answer is "no" because the libraries are in an uncertain institutional environment on one hand, and on the other – in a market economy with intense competition on IT services. It is a fact that the market is dominated by technology giants like Google, Microsoft, etc., international publishers and distributors of IT products, local "players" or small suppliers, who are struggling, however, to attract the same customers. The success of libraries today largely depends on their positioning in the free market of information services (with or without support by 56 the state). How the public libraries could meet the preferences of the users without clear governmental policy and with an insignificant financing? The author concludes that the public libraries have to prepare for three key transformations: (а) to orient their services for users through competitive technologies for the information access; (в) to change their internal structure and to take new activities (mostly related to the management of information flows in the computer networks); (c) to have sufficient qualified personnel in the areas of ICT. |