Nablus Library

Nablus Library is the oldest and largest public library in the West Bank, Palestine. The library was established by the municipality of Nablus with aid from the Jordanian government in 1960. The building itself is a 19th-century Ottoman-era structure, which was a café in its former life. Surrounding the library building is a garden, used as a community space for lectures and events. During the First Intifada, while most schools and universities in the West Bank were shuttered, Nablus Library remained open. In the late 1990s, the library opened a children's department for the first time. As of late 2013, the library was constructing an audiovisual room. Nablus Library's circulating collection includes some 80,000 books, most of which are in Arabic. Besides the circulating collection, Nablus Library also houses several significant archival collections, including the so-called Prisoner's Section, an archive of materials made and used by Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails between 1975 and 1995, as well as the personal collection of Qadri Tuqan, a Nablusi educator and one of the founders of An-Najah College, now An-Najah National University. Other collections include Palestinian newspapers dating back to the 1920s, as well as a collection of sharia court documents from northern Palestine spanning the length of the Mandate Period. Nablus Library also houses doctoral theses d

Library data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).