Vodice Public Library (Gradskaknjižnica Vodice) is a public library in a touristic Croatian town Vodice in Šibenik-Knin County. Our main goal is to meet intellectual and cultural needs of our citizens, and we feel this is especially important in small towns where these contents are not easily (if at all) available. As a small library, we especially cherish personal and friendly contact with our patrons, tourists and other visitors who appreciate us for our family atmosphere and a great sea view.

Vodice libraries had a discontinued history that goes back to the end of 19^th century when Vodice were a farming village. Long awaited continuity starts in 1995, right after the war, when Public library and reading room Vodice was founded.  So, 22 years ago, in 1996 our library has started its work with patrons in one room in an old building. Of course this room was not suitable for modern library’s needs, so at the beginning of the new millennia an idea of a new library building was born. This idea was finally realized in 2013 when an elementary school, built in 1911 by Austrians, was renovated to meet modern library’s needs. In these 240 m² we have separate departments for kids, youth and adults, reading room (with science and reference books, magazines, and computers), multimedia room for meetings, lectures and exhibitions, and other staff offices and rooms.

We are oriented towards the needs and wishes of our patrons, and we make all the decisions on the library material acquisitions with that in mind. In addition to classic literature books, popular science books, and other, we have especially nice collection of foreign and domestic crime and romance novels that our readers love, just as same as religious and travel books. As I stated earlier, we are a young library so we are still building our patron habits to visit and use the library (and we are very satisfied with our success). We must create and nourish the reading habits of our youngest patrons to do so. With that in mind, we acquire a lot of quality picture books, didactic toys and board games and we’ve started a comic book collection.

Apart from regular library activities (book loans, acquisition, cataloguing, classification, statistics, paper work, information service), we plan and organize many programmes for all generations which work in 4 equally important directions:

·   reading habits - reading aloud with 4 to 6-year olds with a creative workshop afterwards, toddler Rhyme-Time (singing, jumping, playing), and youth poetry program;

·   social inclusion and ICT literacy - reading with pre-schoolers with the emphasis on early detection of speech impediment and developing of language skills through different language games, basic computer literacy program for senior citizens and cooperation with Centre for Social Inclusion in Šibenik;

·   international cooperation – with Hungarian artists who exhibit their art every summer, with Bibliotheca Municipal Vega la Camocha through the NAPLE Sister Libraries Program, and we hope to establish cooperation with a library in Poland (2019.);

·   heritage – we organize local poetry evenings, we have created a knowledge sharing group about foraging local edible and medicinal plants, host local artists’ art exhibitions and we’ve started to collect Vodice heritage collection.

Other programs include: Animation of democracy with local youth through investigating and debating social impact of music and other subcultures, homework help to elementary and high school students, chess workshop, pub quiz evenings in the local pub, photo and video workshop, chess school, finance literacy workshop for kids, programming and robot workshop with Micro:Bit technology, and book delivery for senior and immobile patrons.

In future, we plan to make an even bigger emphasis on reading habits and we want to include more volunteers to encourage the idea that sharing is the strength of every community.