Our goal of increasing the number of next-generation libraries across the city, improving their collections, and transforming them into a new lively spaces and centres of culture, arts, and sciences, will continue in 2023.
All libraries affiliated to the IMM provide services with access to more than 1 million books, printed publications, rare works, yearbooks, newspapers, magazines, etc. We continue to be one a leading supporter of researchers with the Atatürk Library collection, which contains more than 500 thousand works, and has qualified and private collections including printed Ottoman books, periodicals, manuscripts, rare works in foreign languages, maps, postcards, yearbooks, calendars, and personal archives.
Sevgi Soysal Library and Culture House, located in one of the most central points of Taksim, adjacent to the Atatürk Library, and the historical Museum Gazhane in Kadıköy, continue to provide 24/7 service. Along with the number of our libraries, the number of readers and researchers using them is also increasing day by day.
Our events are designed to reflect up-to-date librarianship, that is global, creative, and conscious. We are continuing the series of activities we started in 2021 that focus on fostering creativity and identity. For example, fairy tale, creative drama, and story-writing workshops for children. All IMM libraries are part of this program. We also host multi-disciplinary talks, discussions, and interviews.
In consultation with leading academics in the field we create intellectual activities. In the IPA (Istanbul Planning Agency) Istanbul Library, a library specialized in urban studies, we welcome leaders in the fields of architecture, urban history, and urban studies for interviews and panels.
We care about bringing an up-to-date selection from different publishers to our readers. We bring new works to our collections in line with our publication enhancement policy.
With this perspective, we purchased a total of 998,908 printed publications in 2021 for our newly opened libraries. The same year we also added a total of 30,621 rare works to our Atatürk Library rare works collection, including 30,265 documents, 82 photographs, 62 maps, 6 printed books, 4 Ottoman books, 18 rare magazines, 1 rare newspaper, 5 posters, and 178 postcards. In 2022, we continued to enrich our collection with the purchase of 325 rare photographs.
You can access all works in our libraries from the Atatürk Library website and http://katalog.ibb.gov.tr.
The Atatürk Library digitised works were used 50,160,710 times in 2021, and 42,341,220 times in 2022.
We continue with our expert staff to repair valuable rare works such as Ottoman newspapers, books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, postcards, and yearbooks, in the Atatürk Library. We have repaired 13 engravings, 77 bindings of different types, 43 maps, 51 historical documents, 57 photographs and 15,263 pages of rare works, newspapers and magazine materials in 2021.
In 2022, in collaboration with experts, we rapaired a total of 10,186 volumes of different types: 29 maps, 329 historical documents, 397 manuscripts, 7,251 pages of rare works, 2,148 pages of newspaper and magazine materials.
IMM, adopts the principle of equal citizenship and thus is committed to improving the activities of the Audio Library. At the Audio Library, located in the Eyüpsultan district of Istanbul, we convert printed books into audiobooks together with volunteer citizens.
Publication is one of the key forms of intellectual production the library undertakes as a centre of culture, art and knowledge. In 2021-2022 we published a total of 13 works. In 2022, we curated a total of 24 exhibitions with the interested parties.
