If you can not visit the library

If you cannot visit the library

Personal Service to the Home is a special form of library activities intended for those who due to physical handicap, illness or age cannot visit the library. The origins of this service are connected with the local Health Centre and the Social Centre which helped us to reach our target groups. The activities are led by a skilled librarian who is experienced in work with such groups of people. She visits them twice a week at their homes, brings requested books, magazines or articles with her. Thus an important and (for many of these clients) a very rare contact with the outside world is maintained. The library material is available from the Mobile Library, the Rotovž Library and the Main Reading Room.

Personal Service to the Hospital. After several months of discussions with the management of the Maribor General Hospital a project of personal service (loan of the library material) for the patients in some hospital wards was prepared and organized. A librarian, based at the Tabor Library (which is located close to the Hospital), visits the patients every day. After they become Library members, they are provided with the requested library material on a regular basis.

The aim of this service is to:

• contribute in a positive way to the process of hospitalization and reconvalescence;
• help preventing isolation of the hospitalized;
• contribute to patients' accommodation to the outside environment after hospitalization;
• encourage reading also during hospitalization / recovery;
• to encourage active use of patients' free time.

With this service we would like to help people to pass their time in hospital more pleasantly. They can just phone the Tabor Library, Dvorakova 3, Maribor, phone: ++ 386 (0)2 331 88 70, and our librarian will be happy to provide them with the books they want. They can call the above number every day from Monday to Friday between 9.00 and 19.00 or write to our address: The Tabor Library (Personal Service to the Hospital), Dvorakova 3, Maribor, Slovenia.

Upon leaving the hospital, they can leave the borrowed material with the head nurse or return it personally at the Tabor Library. If they have become a member of our library while being in hospital, their membership card remains valid in all of our libraries.

Mobile library material collections are located in different institutions and are intented for those people who cannot come to libraries themselves. At the moment there are such collections in one of retirement homes, at the Institution for Mentally Disadvantaged Children and at the Psychiatry Ward of the Maribor General Hospital. A librarian and a representative of the institution together decide which books should be included in a collection (collections are changed twice a year). There is enough of reading material suitable for the patients as well as for the staff. The collections are changed twice a year.

Mobile Library Visits at the “Polž” (Snail) Day-Care Center. The Maribor Public Library bibliobus stops once a month also at the “Polž” (Snail) Day-Care Center (Varstveno-delovni center Polž) in Maribor. The Center employs people with special needs (functionally and intellectually disadvantaged). During visits at the Polž Center the bibliobus crew consists of four members; they are assisted by the Center's staff. The librarians assist the visitors with choosing suitable library material, but they also chat with them, and for many inmates of the Center the Mobile Library represents one of few contacts with the outside world. They are very fond of visiting the bibliobus every month. The Maribor Public Library also helped the Center’s staff and inmates establish their own library. A number of books were donated and processed with the help of the Maribor Public Library and the Center's inmates were taught how to work in their library. This has become a form of work therapy and according to the experience of the Center’s staff, it has contributed significantly to a better atmosphere between inmates; they are also more confident, since now they can run their library themselves.