Βιβλιοθήκη και Κέντρο Πληροφόρησης Αριστοτελείου Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλονίκης

Prime Minister Alexandros Papanastassiou decided to found a university in Thessaloniki in 1924. The University of Thessaloniki started operating in 1925 and the University Library was founded in 1927. All schools of the University including the Library were located in a building right next to the Jewish cemetery. The mansion on the Ethnikis Amynis St served as the 2nd Military Hospital of the city during the WWI and hosted the university administration and the library till the 1970s.

The AUTh Library started operating in 1927 with an almost zero budget. The need for scholar information motivated professors and Greek scholars from diaspora to actively engage in enriching the library’s collections. The initial core of the Library collection was the donation of G. Konstantinidis, books from school libraries, namely Gymnasium of Thessaloniki, the All-Male Teacher Training School and the Education Academy of Thessaloniki. To this initial core more books from school collections were added; books that were initially collected for the "Frontistirion" of Trebizond (K. Konstantinidis’ donation) but never reached Asia Minor due to the destruction of 1922 and books from other Asia Minor schools saved from destruction and transferred in Thessaloniki by the “Fund for Exchangeable Property”. Georgios Konstantinidis was a former National Library of Greece Director (1890-91, 1895) and donated his library of 8.000 books to the Aristotle University. Gymnasium of Thessaloniki was a Hellenic school operating during the Ottoman occupation in Thessaloniki and its books were mostly Ancient Greek literature classics. All-Male Teacher Training School was a 3-year school operating during 1914-1929. Its books were mostly historic and travel books. K. Konstantinidis was a rich trader from Trebizond (1856 - 1930) that worked hard for the creation of an independent Democracy of Pontos. Library's collection further developed through printed journals subscriptions and important private collections either donated or purchased, such as N. Politis, A. Svolos, A. Delmouzos, A. Papanastassiou, M. Triantafyllidis, A. Pallis, I. Trikoglou collections.

Thanks to all these efforts, the AUTh Library collections go back in time presenting diversity in terms of language, place, genre, and format. Some collection highlights include 113 manuscripts dating from the 10th century, rare books dating from 1495, and maps from the 16th century. Nowadays, the library’s collection includes more than 1.302.000 printed and electronic books, access to 16.000 electronic journals and 64 bibliographic databases (AUTh Library and HEAL-Link consortium subscriptions). The AUTh Library actively supports the Open Access Movement since 2003. Hence, digitization and open access to theses and dissertations awarded from AUTh are two ongoing services reaching in total more than 4.000.000 million pages (archival collections, books, articles, newspapers, doctoral & postgraduate dissertations, research papers published by AUTh Faculty, etc.). Communities and important Greek scholars continue to enrich the collections. Professors leaving on pension often donate their collections and papers to the Library. In 2014, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki was offered access to the Visual History Archive (USC Shoah Foundation, c2019), a collection of interviews of Holocaust and other genocides’ survivors. In 2018, the Visual History Archive became a Proquest company product. The perpetual access to the archive was donated to Aristotle University of Thessaloniki by the German Consulate in Thessaloniki as a tribute to the 60.000 Jews from Thessaloniki that were deported to Nazi concentration camps. In 2016, professor I. Megas and poet N. Christianopoulos donated their collections to Aristotle University containing thousands of postcards, art items, books, manuscripts, correspondence, interviews, journals, etc. In 2019, the Central Macedonia Regional Unit and its Cultural Centre have donated the “Centre for the Study and Development of Hellenic Culture of the Black Sea” archives and the library. The Black Sea Centre was founded in 1996 and operated until 2011. During its operations, the Black Sea Centre developed a series of cultural activities, it actively recorded the presence of Greeks in the area in terms of monitoring the numbers of Greek education schools and teachers, and clubs. Moreover, it gained copies from former USSR archives or State Archives from Black Sea countries that involved the Greek presence in the area. The Endowed Chair of Pontic Studies took the initiative for this donation and the transfer costs were covered by the Charitable Foundation of Ivan Savvidi.

Excerpt from the following article: Koseoglou, E., & Zapounidou, S. (2019). Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Library & Information Centre: A new-old library. In Boutoura, C., Tsorlini, A., & Livieratos, E. (ed). (2019). Proceedings 14th ICA Conference Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Thessaloniki, 8-10 May 2019 (pp. 192-196). Thessaloniki: International Cartographic Association, Commission on Cartographic Heritage into the Digital, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

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