The Central Library of this institution is operating as an autonomous and independent service in the hierarchy management level and it is under the authority of the rector or under the appointed vice-rector.
The library’s mission is the enhancement and support of the educational and research procedures of the institution, the contribution in the recovery, management and provision of specified information to the wider national and international community and its substantial involvement in every related activity to education and culture.
The central library’s manager is responsible for the operation of the central library as well as its Patision annex, carries out the human resource management, public relations, the strategic and operational planning and the development projects.
The main building of the library is situated within the “Polytechneioupoli” Campus and its annex is at the historical building at Patision Street where the Averof library and reading room and the Bouboulinas library and reading room both are.
More specifically:
- The NTUA Central Library is modern building, which extends over 7000 sq.m. and is situated within the “Polytechneioupoli” Campus. It has 600 studying stations and it encloses 250.000 books and journals.
- The Library and Reading room at the Averof building is responsible for the physical and bibliographic editing of the material, it provides information and training to the users, conducts loans, returns, holdings, renewals of materials and the indexing of architectural magazines. The organization of the annex is supported by the central library, thus its structure is similar and it is under the administrative organization of the central library.
- The Library and Reading room of the Bouboulina building manage the grey bibliography of the school of Architecture and provides user services. At this building is also situated the special collection of “K.A. Doxiades Library” where the actual and bibliographic editing of the material takes place.
Structure – Responsibilities
The Central Library is constituted of the following departments:
Α) Department of Administrative & Economic Support:
- Conducts the administrative support of the library and the library’s senate committee, creates and sends all necessary documents, is responsible for the library’s mail and archives.
- Created yearly budget and accounts for the previous years, is responsible for the invoices in collaboration with the economic service of the university, supervises, conducts and controls the orders.
- Creates the strategic and operational planning of the library.
Β) Department of Bibliographical editing and collection development:
- Conducts the ordering of print and electronic material, determines the acceptance policy of the orders, manages the orders for all collections, imports items on the collaborative bibliographic catalogue (ILSaS), supervises the physical and bibliographic editing of the material, edits sub-collections, manages the historical and other special collections
- Provides bibliographic coverage to lectures of the university’s schools, conducts qualitative control of the bibliographic catalogue, creates and controls the authority records, conducts the supply of scientific journals and electronic databases, audits the electronic and print subscriptions, organizes training seminars for the users and staff, and updates the journal issues on the library’s system.
Βi) Department of Preservation of Historical Collections and NTUA Archives
It is constituted from specific personnel, which is responsible for the following:
- The functioning of historical collection and NTUA archives composed of material from NTUA and donations.
- The responsibility of indexing and sorting all new incoming collections.
- The maintenance of the material
- Photocopy, photographing, digitalization services for the scientific community.
- The enrichment of collections via donations.
- The collaboration with other relative libraries nationally and internationally.
Because of the particularity of this collection, the library staff is collaborating with academic members of the institution assigned by the senate.
The policy for donations of scientific and technical collections and of historical value material, including its preservation, cataloguing, photographing and digitalization is described next.
It includes the following collections:
- The historical library of NTUA which constitutes a distinctive, but integral department of the central library, containing singular archives and historical material of the library.
- The special collection with the title “K.A. Doxiades Library” which can be found in the annex of Patision Library. It is an important donation which was accepted from the institution on December 1998. It includes the well known collection of the Athenian Holistic Centre, donated to the NTUA by the “Emma and Konstantinos Doxiades foundation”.
- Important scientific donations from members of the NTUA and wider academic community.
C) Department of Information Technology and Technical Support
- Supervises, manages and supports the Institutional Repository, which encloses the digital collection of the dissertations and theses of the institution and is constantly being enriched with publications from the members of the academic community, aiming to assemble all the research activity of the institution. Every student of the university is obliged to submit his/her dissertation at the repository of the library. The workflow and specifications for such a submission are decided by the central library. Additionally, it is obligatory to submit any additional publications related to the dissertations. All the items in the repository are protected by intellectual property rights which belong to the author who grants to the library of NTUA the non exclusive right to publish, distribute and put forward their publications on the web through the repository for educational, research and private / not commercial purposes.
- Provides technical support and bibliographic processing of digital items, processes and controls the acceptance of dissertations, manages the configuration and maintenance of the library system, provides technical support and maintenance to the hardware, software and the network and manages the website of the library.
D) Department of User Information & Training
- Supports the catalogue search, the search and access to the full text of electronic and digital sources, provides evaluation of services and is concerned with user satisfaction. This department also plans and manages the information literacy training courses and seminars.
- Ensures the infrastructure for the operation of information centers for the schools of the university, with the participation of a librarian for every school, plans new services, undertakes new user subscriptions, loans, returns, holdings, renewals.
- Plans and supervises loan regulations, ensures improvements in those regulations and loan services, provides staff and user training, is responsible for loans between libraries, and orders articles for the users using the appropriate application.
