Memory by Valentina Terzieva, Director of the Town Library “Penio Penev” in Dimitrovgrad

I met Snejana Ianeva in 2013 when she was a guest to our library on the occasion of its 60-th anniversary, but I had heard years before that about her devoted and inspiring service to the libraries. Later in 2016, on her invitation, I started to teach how the robots “Finch” worked, which was the reason our contacts became more frequent. I remember our long telephone conversations in which Sneja shared her vision about the future of the libraries and her disappointment that the changes and transformations were very slow and required a lot of efforts; about her hope that the library community will find the necessary and adequate support by the state. I will not forget our joint work on a lot of projects which we realized together.

Owing to her, as the President of the Bulgarian Library and Information Association and the Chair of the Board of “Global Libraries Bulgaria” Foundation, our library took part in many programs and projects. Their good results are at the basis of the rapid development of our library and the satisfaction of a great number of readers in the last 10 years.

I would like to mention only some of them:

• Participation of our representatives in international projects with the goal to exchange experience and training;
• Program “Global Libraries Bulgaria” about the technical equipment of the libraries and further training of the librarians;
• Granting of 10 “Finch” robots and 6 “Bee Bot” and training the staff how to work with them;
• Project, for which the library received a new multimedia projector;
• Participation of our representative at the Global Conversations about the future of the libraries.

For more than 30 years this remarkable women born in our town, has been the champion of the modernization of the libraries as one of the foundations of the democratic changes in our country. She initiated the use the new technologies in the libraries. She was an author of so many reports and presentations in the country and abroad and she was among the founders of the magazine “Bulgarian Library and Information Association online”.