Hanau City Library
| Hanau City Library | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Kulturforum Hanau with city library
|
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| Library type | library |
| place |
Hanau 
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| ISIL | DE-143 |
| operator | City of Hanau |
| Website | http://www.kulturforum-hanau.de/ |
The Hanau City Library is the city of Hanau's public library . It is located in the Hanau Cultural Forum together with the Hanau City Archives.
history
The foundation stone for a library in Hanau was formed by the private collection of government councilor Johann Peter Ruth with 3,100 volumes, who bequeathed this collection to the city of Hanau on his death in 1845 on the condition that a public library be established from it. This resulted in the General Reading Society for the Hanau City Library in 1846 . For an annual membership fee, members could read new works exclusively for three years, after which they were part of the holdings of the municipal library and could be used by all Hanau citizens.
The library grew in the following years thanks to numerous donations from citizens of Hanau, including the lawyer Jakob Löbenstern, who donated his private collection of 250 titles and 400 volumes to the city in 1864, and the consistorial councilor Johann Ulrich Emmel, who in 1870 gave the city over 1000 volumes donated.
The city library had been housed in the former building of the Hanau Regional Court on Neustädter Markt since 1922 and burned down completely in the air raids on Hanau, with the entire collection of 60,000 books being destroyed. Only 6500 mostly scientific titles were outsourced in 1944 and could thus be saved.
After the war, the city library temporarily moved to Philippsruhe Palace , until the decision was made to accommodate the city library in the future office building of the former Hanau City Palace . The premises were moved into in 1953 and the library was considered the most modern in Hesse at the time.
Due to the growing stock, there was an increasing lack of space, so that the city of Hanau had been looking for an alternative for some time. This finally came about with the planned urban redevelopment and the construction of the Forum Hanau . The city of Hanau rented part of the Hanau Forum building for an annual rent of 1.71 million euros plus 531,000 euros in operating costs and invested 2.1 million euros in the equipment. In July 2015, the move of 150,000 books from the office building to the new location of the library in the Forum Hanau, the Kulturforum, began, after two months the move was complete and the Hanau City Library celebrated its reopening in September 2015.
The media center had a different story. It was created on the initiative of a teacher at District School I (today's Pestalozzi School) in 1934 and was initially housed there. During the Second World War, the historic cityscape of Hanau was systematically documented and photographed in view of the impending bombing war. The image was located in the Hanau City Palace and was lost in the air raid on Hanau, the negatives themselves were stored in the air raid shelter under the Neustadt town hall and survived the war unscathed. After the war, the image areas of the city and district of Hanau were merged for cost reasons . It was not until 1992 that the cooperation with the now Main-Kinzig-Kreis was terminated and the city of Hanau managed its picture site again. After several moves, the picture site moved into a domicile in the Technical Town Hall in the former Hessen-Homburg barracks . With the opening of the Hanau Cultural Forum, the picture section was merged with the city library.
With the incorporation of the city of Großauheim , the city of Hanau took over the local library in a historic building in the Alte Langgasse in Großauheim's old town. Plans by the city of Hanau to close the branch for cost reasons led to great criticism and the inclusion of the Großauheim branch in the culture red list . The Großauheim branch was finally successfully privatized on the initiative of Großauheim citizens and has been privately managed since 2014.
Duration
The Hanau City Library now has 132,000 volumes. In addition to modern fiction , the focus of the Hanau City Library is on local history with the Hanau-Hessen regional history department, which has over 16,000 volumes, of which 2300 are historical volumes from before the Second World War. The scientific department includes a total of 4200 volumes with historical works dating back to the 16th century and 450 magazine volumes with historical newspapers such as the Hanauer Anzeiger .
The Hanau City Archive is open to the public as a reference library during limited opening times. The cultural forum is also the seat of the Hanau History Association and the Wetterau Society with their own extensive historical collections.
use
The issuance of a library card is not restricted geographically. Of the 13,000 library cards issued, 8,700 are citizens of Hanau, 3,300 are citizens of the Main-Kinzig district, the rest is distributed among the cities and municipalities in the more distant area. The Hanau City Library has a catchment area that extends to Frankfurt, the Wetterau and the Bavarian Kahlgrund . In 2018, 385,000 media were loaned out, a decrease of 30,000 media compared to the previous year.
literature
- Bernhard Fabian (Hrsg.): Handbook of the historical book inventory in Germany . Digitized by Günter Kükenshöner. Olms New Media, Hildesheim 2003.