10 more mobile libraries take to road in Turkey

By Burcu Calik

ANKARA (AA) – A delivery ceremony for 10 mobile libraries to 10 provinces took place in capital Ankara on Wednesday.

Speaking at the ceremony, Culture and Tourism Minister Numan Kurtulmus said that nearly 400,000 people used the mobile libraries last year, and he hoped that this figure would further increase this year.

With the delivery of the latest batch of mobile libraries, the total number has reached 54, with each mobile library dispatched to a separate province to serve a largely rural population with its books and computers.

“Hopefully in the next few years, we would like to have a mobile library in every one of our 81 provinces… We will thus make many more people closer to books,” Kurtulmus said.

Hamdi Tursucu, the general manager of Libraries and Publications in the Culture Ministry, said that mobile libraries had 160,000 collections, traveled to 1,375 spots last year, and had around 90,000 members.

“We will hopefully increase these numbers,” he said.

The 10 converted buses were sent to the Adiyaman, Agri, Aksaray, Ardahan, Bingol, Canakkale, Kastamonu, Kirikkale, Mersin, and Yalova provinces after the ceremony.