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The Presidential Library should become a central link for the country’s entire library system, Mr Putin said at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and the Arts.

The 2007 annual Address to the Federal Assembly set the goal of reviving the country’s library system on a new foundation. The President noted that Russia currently has more than 130,000 libraries and that, according to the experts, they are visited far more often than other cultural institutions. Young people aged from 14–25 make up seventy percent of library users.

But at the same time, little attention has been given until recently to funding for libraries and work to look after and develop their collections. Most of the library resources being used today were developed during the Soviet period.

The President spoke of the need to equip libraries, including village and school libraries, with modern information technology and common software and to pay more attention to seriously building up the collections of children’s and young people’s libraries.

Furthermore, libraries should be staffed by modern professionals able to transform them from storage houses for books into information, analysis and leisure centres, Mr Putin said.