A grand library in the Turkish capital Ankara welcomed over 670,000 visitors last year despite the pandemic constricting human mobility severely.
Inaugurated in Ankara by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in February 2020, the Nation’s Library received nearly 1,800 visitors daily in 2021.
Considering the distribution of visitors by age groups, the most frequent visitors to the library belonged to the 16-30 age group with 485,986 people, while the 31-45 age group was in second place with 102,114 people.
Complimentary hot drinks and water to visitors stood out among the factors that attracted young people to the library, according to daily Milliyet.
In addition,soup is offered to visitors free of charge during the daytime and cake during the night as of October 2021, the report added.
The library continues to provide over 4.1 million printed resources in a 125,000-square-meter area with a seating capacity of 5,000 people.
Aside from its rich printed resources, the library also offers a variety of electronic resources, including 65 databases, nearly 200 million electronic publications, over 665,000 e-books, 77,448 e-journals and more than 7 million e-theses.
Inspired by Seljuk, Ottoman and contemporary architecture, the library has over 121,000 members.