A Visit to the National Library of Kosovo

On October 5th 2019, I was lucky enough to travel from Portland, Oregon to Pristina, Kosovo to serve for three weeks as a Fulbright Specialist at the National Library of Kosovo.  I knew very little about Kosovo before this opportunity. I think the name Kosovo was familiar to me from the 90s when the United States intervened there under the Clinton administration. Of course, I jumped at the chance to visit the Balkans for the first time ever. I was not disappointed.

The National Library is located in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, which is a very hip, thriving city with a mishmash of architecture. The National Library itself is a stunning example of brutalist design that takes some of its cues from the historic mosques and cathedrals of Kosovo. It's one of the most well know structures in Pristina.

The National Library at night

I was tasked with facilitating the development of a five year strategic plan for the National Library. This was a bit of a daunting task from the start as the library essentially operates in Albanian and most of its annual reports and operating documentation are in Albanian (though English is mandated as one of the official languages for government laws and regulations).

I kicked off my first day by meeting with the Governing Council of the National Library, made up largely of scholars and the head of another government ministry. After espressos and sparkling water delivered to our meeting space by the in-house library cafe, we enjoyed lunch at Symphony, traditional Kosovar Albanian and a favorite of the library leadership. I had one of their specialities: steak cooked on a hot rock delivered to your place setting.

Yugoslav-era clock in the staff lounge.

The next day I got a tour of the building. Its truly an architectural marvel, with stunning modernist design details everywhere from the grand entryway and atrium to the elevators and stairways. I took tons of pictures, but then I discovered that the Getty Foundation had recently done a conservation study on the building which does an impressive job of documenting its design. There are 99 domes in the library and most rooms are built under a dome of a particular size.

The closed stacks

On my tour I learned that the core service provided by the library is housing and providing access to a closed stacks collection. The building's bottom two floors are outfitted as closed stacks (complete with a Yugoslav-era mechanical book escalator) and materials are housed there by accession number. The library's main function is to accession, catalog, store, and retrieve materials from this repository. As it serves as The Library of Congress for Kosovo, the Library automatically receives a copy of any book published in Kosovo and must also issue ISBNs to publishers. As it is the library of record it also does pretty much all original cataloging.

One of the reading rooms.

The strategic planning workshop sessions started soon after the tours. In these sessions I met with various library units and tried to suss out the library's needs, interests, aspirations, etc. On some of them we used the standard Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats framework. The discussions happened mostly through a translator, which slowed the pace a bit, but generally worked well. Flip charts were deployed but we managed to avoid colored dots. 

Sometimes it took discussing around a topic to finally reveal a big, important piece of information that I probably should have known from the beginning. Like the relationship of the University Library to the National Library (which I still can't exactly explain) or the fact the library was about to deploy a new organziational structure.

Workshopping the strategic plan.

The library has about 80 staff members and I probably met with 30+. All of them were very dedicated to their jobs and quite enthusiastic about the mission of the library. The range of positions I encountered included someone who did bookbinding and restoration, to the repository manager, to circulation attendants, the head of acquisitions and the associate director.

The October afternoons were warm and sunny and some of the rooms in the library got quite hot with the sunlight beating down on the domes. Mostly I spent my late afternoons hanging out at cafes and working. I knocked down two to three of machiato's a day (Pristina's favorite coffee drink). In the first week and a half or so I poured over documentation about the library with the aid of Google Translate and did an "environmental scan" of other national libraries to see how Kosovo's activities compared. The last week and a half I spent drafting the strategic plan.

Starting the day off right at Prince Coffee Shop at the Grand Hotel Pristina.

Some themes emerged which came out in the plan. The building is a major asset, it's location being right at the center of the University of Pristina and of Pristina itself. It's distinct architecture makes it a Pristina landmark, a place for hosting various government and nongovernmental events and exhibits, and even a tourist destination. The building was neglected for many years, especially during the 1990s and only in the last two decades has there been regular updates and maintenance. A big part of the plan is to continue improving the building with the aid of a master plan, which can help align the building's space usage with the library's programmatic needs.

Even though the University of Pristina provides some library resources, the National Library acts as a defacto library for their students. I met with a group of students who were quite interested in improving the library's spaces and expanding services. Despite a somewhat cumbersome system (at least by US standards) of calling books from the closed stacks and then only using them in the designated reading rooms, these students were frequent and enthusiastic users of the library. Among library staff there was clear interest in moving to at least a partial open stacks configuration as well as a more comprehensive reference/research services setup, so this is part of the draft plan as well.

The National Library rotunda.

The library's position as the "highest library" in Kosovo led me to look into best practices at national libraries, particularly those of small countries. I found that many of them had advanced services for digital book delivery, e book deposit, and web site harvesting. The National Library of Kosovo is on the cusp of launching a digital library of cultural heritage material and this should be its first step in building out a set of digital operations. The library currently does all its cataloging work in isolation on an aging Aleph system they share with a couple of the larger public library systems in Kosovo. On the agenda is consideration of OCLC membership, which would help them take advatange of existing bibliographic records and share their own records, as well as build out a library network in Kosovo. Interestingly, there is a major library consortium called COBISS in the Balkans that has its own home-grown integrated library system that grew out of a system from the Yugoslav days.

Kosovo is an area that has had a difficult history both in the recent past and further back. Almost everyone I spoke with had a story of exile during the war in the late 90s and many people never returned. Capturing the recent history of Kosovo that is still within living memory is a major opportunity for the National Library. The nineties are a particularly interesting period as Yugoslav-Serb repression led the Albanian community in Kosovo to develop parallel governmental and educational institutions. I learned of an idea for an exciting project to recover some of that history through interviews and various forms of documentation. 

The Kosovo flag has six stars to represent the major ethnic groups of Kosovo: Albanians, Serbs, Turks, Gorani, Romani, and Bosniaks. Though the Kosovar Albanians dominate at 95% of the population, the National Library is charged with representing all the ethnic minorities in the state, and this task is also an aspect of the plan. 

The Kosovo Flag, courtesy of Wikimedia

With Kosovo being a new state that was formed out of an international intervention, there is a large international presence in Pristina.  There are many NGOs, consuls and embassys and it seems like half the people you meet work for one of these things. The United States State Department still has a very large presence in the country with a large new Embassy. Even in the library there is an "American Corner" which offers English language library resources to check-out as well as programming designed to engage young people. Living in the US it's hard to comprehend the influence this country wields abroad.

Bill Clinton statue on Bulevardi Bill Klinton in Pristina

The strategic plan that I drafted will now go through a process of further review and modification and hopefully reach a final stage in the next few months.  

Fueling the strategic plan with a 'big macchiato'