By Christian Diabl, April 9, 2024, 5:43 a.m
LINZ. Digital media is catching up, but 80 percent of loans in the Linz City Library are still “available for grabs”.
The absolute numbers are manageable. But if you still listen to CDs, you’ll probably pick up “Bravo Hits” in the Linz city library. At least the hit collection of the cult youth magazine has reliably topped the lending charts for 20 years, possibly even longer, but the head of the city libraries, Heike Merschitzka, oversees this period. The first editions are no longer available because you can no longer simply buy them. Bravo Hits 1, for example, is now highly valued among collectors.
Image: OÖN
“}”> Frozen tops the Tonies hit list. Image: OÖN
Frozen is number one
What were cassettes and CDs for their parents are now so-called Tonies for children, small figures with which you can listen to stories when you place them on a padded cube. There are 400 of these Tonies in the city library, almost all of them available. “We buy everything there is,” says Merschitzka in an OÖN interview. “Frozen” is the most popular with children, followed by “Paw Patrol” and the Gruffalo – if you have small children or grandchildren you will probably know all three. The library’s customers are quite young: a good third of regular customers are under 17, and almost 4,000 are under 13.
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Even though digital media have become more important, books and the like dominate the statistics. In 2023, out of around 988,000 loans, almost 800,000 were analogue media. At the end of 2023, more than 163,000 analog media were available at the six locations, of which more than 10,000 titles are sorted out and bought new in approximately the same quantity every year. The so-called “zero list” provides guidance and shows which media were not asked for once. This can have various reasons, from theft to an unsuitable installation location. If there is a lack of demand, the title will be sorted out.
Purchase from Linz bookstores
The respective area managers decide what is new. As far as possible, the library buys books directly from Linz bookstores – according to the book price fixing law with a ten percent discount. The selection also depends on the focus of the content. In the city library, these include foreign languages, digital education offerings, promoting reading for children and sustainability.
Things work differently for the approximately 58,000 digital media for which the library acquires licenses, which automatically expire after one or two years and must be actively renewed.
We are currently making room for new things in the knowledge tower. Books, CDs and DVDs from the library’s collection are available at bargain prices at the flea market in the foyer until April 12th.
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