Parliamentary libraries serve parliamentary institutions on a national
or local level. Usually they are founded at the same time as the parliament
itself and organized according to the parliamentary model of
the country in which they are located. The parliamentary library’s
mission is to support and facilitate parliamentary activities and make
available all useful sources of information to the parliament as a
whole. Thus, the parliamentary library is a specialized library from
the point of view of the collections’ coverage and of patrons as well.
Today, parliamentary libraries are at a turning point in their history.
All over the world they are radically changing their nature and
are reinventing themselves. They are facing two main challenges:
the convergence toward a digital and networked society and the
changing role of parliaments themselves. Parliamentary libraries
are heading in two main directions: they are becoming documentation
centers by integrating their services with other parliamentary
offices and departments, meaning that they sometimes give up their
physical structure; and they are extending themselves beyond their
traditional roles by also serving the general public, by acquiring the
status of national libraries, or by becoming central research libraries
for a specific field such as political science and law.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/16680
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Library Trends 58 (4) Spring 2010: The Purpose, Present Situation and Future of the Parliamentary Library. Edited by Gro Sandgrind and Hermina G.B. Anghelescu.
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