Talk:List of national libraries

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Nice list, but I would like to see foundation dates for each library listed as well. --Ghirla -трёп- 09:41, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] UK

The UK has 6 legal deposit libraries, not just the British Library. Seeing as legal deposit library links to national library, they ought to be included in this list.

  • British Library
  • the Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • the University Library, Cambridge
  • the National Library of Scotland
  • the Library of Trinity College, Dublin
  • the National Library of Wales —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.27.140.132 (talk) 21:55, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fields

Can anyone enlighten on just what "Tenable time" and "Year stops" are supposed to mean in this instance? The year of the library's founding, and its closure?--Huaiwei 01:41, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm stumped too... GregorB 19:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Marked with {{Incomplete table}}. Someone needs to be bold; the columns are nearly empty anyway, so one could decide anew what they stand for here. GregorB (talk) 11:58, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Library of Alexandria

The article reads, Some of the first libraries were national libraries; for example, the Library of Alexandria was the national library of Ptolemaic Egypt. This is incorrect as it is anachronistic. Egypt, at any time before the mid-twentieth century, wasn't a nation and therefore couldn't have a national library. The concept of "nation" implied in the expression "national library" emerged no earlier than the late-eighteenth century - proof of it is that de facto national libraries such as the British and US Congress libraries are not termed "national libraries". 189.33.13.5 06:31, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Quote from IFLA newsletter

Found this in the IFLA newsletter June 2007 [1] Help needed: Directory of National Libraries on Wikipedia The Standing Committee has discussed the creation of a Directory of national libraries worldwide, taking into account existing lists such as that maintained by the European Library Service for the national libraries of Europe members of CENL (Conference of European National Librarians). We have now learned that a worldwide list exists on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_libraries We think this is an excellent basis for developing a list: since it is open each country may add its national library details and maintain them, thus avoiding setting up another infrastructure. We encourage you therefore to check your country’s national library (and other) details on this site and update – or create - entries as required. Please let us know your comments on the entries and help maintain an up-to-date list. As an example, the reference staff of the Swiss National Library ensure that the Swiss entry is accurate and up-to-date as part of their general information service mission. Thank you for your input! Houshuang (talk) 00:15, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Nice :-) When Itranslated this site to Hebrew (he:רשימת ספריות לאומיות) I found in English some mistakes, but I didn't fix them all (some out of lack of real information), so we really could use an expert's eye. DGtal (talk) 18:01, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The Standing Committee of IFLA’s National Libraries Section chooses Wikipedia as its directory of national libraries

After the initial suggestion above and a discussion at the 2007 IFLA Annual Conference in Durban (South Africa), the Standing Committee mandated an external consultant to study the various options available to establish a comprehensive directory of national libraries. Out of eight different possible options, the analysis retained two, among which was Wikipedia, which were submitted to the vote of the Standing Committee. Wikipedia was chosen with two thirds of the expressed votes. The Standing Committee warmly thanks the contributors to this list as having provided an invaluable basis for its directory and will be active in promoting and completing it. I (the external consultant and current holder of this account) suggest the following changes and developments to both the Wikipedia community and the IFLA-NLS Standing Committee:

  • About this page: standardize library names according to Wikipedia's Naming conventions with the English name (or translation where needed) first, followed by the original name (language and script), between brackets (contrary to what librarians would do in a Library catalogue, but Wikipedia conventions are clear enough) original name first (language and script) followed by the English translation where needed, between brackets - or the other way round (please comment on preference); remove the largely unused columns 'tenable time', 'quantity/year stops' and 'quantity/book'; remove the (very few) duplicates (e.g. Wales) and institutions which are not a national library (e.g. US National Archives and Records Administration, which should be transferred to a similar list of national archives); replace the hyphen by an equal sign (a standard in cataloguing) between linguistic equivalent names of a library in multilingual countries.
  • In most cases, the justification for inclusion into this list is obvious. When it is not, the existence of a legal mandate stating that the library has a role at a national level should determine whether inclusion is justified.
  • About this page's 'daughters', i.e. the individual pages of each national library: the Standing Committee would like some basic information to be provided in a standardized format, which I called 'the IFLA-NLS box', on the top of the page if more information is provided. I suggested in my report to include the geographical/postal address, electronic addresses (website, e-mail for services, information etc.), a brief description of core functions and responsibilities (e.g. items collected and criteria for collection, existence or not of a legal deposit or copyright, reference (or link) to the legal mandate, requirements for accessing the material, with the option of completing this by foundation date, collection size, staff number, annual budget etc.), as well as name, exact title and year of appointment of the CEO (with photograph, direct phone number and e-mail address being left optional).
  • National libraries will be encouraged to manage and update their individual pages themselves, with the National Libraries Section keeping an eye on their consistency.

When the English version has reached a satisfactory state of maturity (which it almost already does), there is the objective of reproducing and adapt it in the other official languages of IFLA: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish, with the help of IFLA Resource Centres and/or national libraries using these languages.

Comments and suggestions are welcome until June 22nd 2008, after which I’ll start working according to the suggested, and maybe amended, line of action.

IFLA-nls-en (talk) 13:14, 5 June 2008 (UTC) - Amendment about names: IFLA-nls-en (talk) 16:42, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest in Wikipedia. While most of your suggestions are good, and we appreciate any help in improving Wikipedia, please ensure any style changes you want to make meet consensus on Wikipedia. Also make sure you understand completely that there is no ownership of articles, so there is a high probability that this article (and any others you want to help with) won't ever completely satisfy you or IFLA. We are building an encyclopedia according to the consensus decisions of the community of Wikipedia editors, which does not include the needs of outside organizations like IFLA. If you want a collaboratively-edited directory that you can be sure will meet IFLA's content requirements, I would recommend starting an IFLA wiki for this purpose, perhaps using MediaWiki, which is free. Since Wikipedia content is licensed under the GFDL, you would be free to copy whatever Wikipedia content you wanted to your own wiki as long as you follow the terms of the GFDL (details here).
As for your particular suggestions. Most of them are good, but there are a couple that would not work on Wikipedia. Firstly, we do not publish email addresses or phone numbers in articles. This is partially for privacy and anti-spam reasons (email addresses in Wikipedia are very public, especially since Wikipedia is scraped by dozens, perhaps hundreds of other websites), but also because email addresses and phone numbers aren't notable information by Wikipedia standards (notable for a directory, yes, but that is not Wikipedia's purpose).
The other suggestion of yours that may be an issue is if you are considering creating an infobox with "IFLA-NLS" in its name. Not only is "IFLA-NLS" indecipherable to those who are not familiar with the organization, it is inappropriate in an infobox name for neutrality reasons. I would suggest {{Infobox National library}} would be a better infobox title. See here for information about making infoboxes. You may even want to use the existing {{Infobox Library}}.
Again, thanks for your interest in Wikipedia, and I hope my comments here are helpful. Also, thank you for your candor, respect for Wikipedia policies, and for waiting for comments before you begin editing. I encourage other editors to weigh in on this discussion, since I am by no means an expert on this somewhat unusual subject. -kotra (talk) 23:37, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Many thanks for your useful advice. About MediaWiki, I'd have to check first that we don't lack the technical competence to run it! For e-mail addresses and phone numbers, no problem we can omit them in Wikipedia and leave to the libraries' websites the choice of providing this information. I agree with you about the title of the infobox and am grateful for the idea of a template. Clpda (talk) 11:49, 12 June 2008 (UTC) (formerly IFLA-nls-en)