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Professor Karim Tahirov, director of the National Library of Azerbaijan, is participating in the 37th CENL annual meeting hosted by the French National Library. CENL is a library organization with members of national libraries from 45 European countries. France is hosting the conference, which is held in a different country every year.

CENL Chairman Frank Scholze opened the conference and expressed his gratitude to all the staff who contributed to the organization of the event at a high level. After that, the director of the National Library of France, Laurence Engel, greeted all the participants and wished success to the work of the confeence.

Then, the minutes of the 36th CENL annual meeting held in 2022 in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, and the CENL annual report were discussed. Then the CENL financial report and the CENL budget for the next year were discussed, put to a vote and unanimously adopted.

As a continuation of the meeting, the Chairman of IFLA ENSULIB Harry Sahavirta gave a speech about sustainability trends within the library.

Then the heads of the National Libraries of France, Azerbaijan, Portugal, Ukraine, Moldova, and Latvia from CENL members made a presentation about sustainability aspects.

Professor Karim Tahirov made a presentation and noted that great work has been done and important achievements have been made in recent years in the direction of applying the newest technical solutions, methods and methods in the process of serving users in the National Library of Azerbaijan. The director emphasized that one of the important directions of the electronicization process is the provision of documents and information to users in electronic format. Karim Tahirov said that the National Library of Azerbaijan has not stopped its activities even for a minute in the conditions of the coronavirus pandemic that has taken the world by storm, and provides uninterrupted online services to readers - researchers and all users who are forced to stay locked in their homes in our country and around the world. The director noted that in 2020-2021, 246,098 resources were sent to users through the National Library's "Order and electronic delivery of documents" online service, and the number of virtual readers of the National Library in those years was 7,500,523. The work of creating full-text electronic resources in the National Library in the conditions of the pandemic was also satisfactory. Despite the obstacles, 88,048 full-text electronic resources (including books, dissertations, periodicals) were created in the National Library with the help of robotic scanners and portable scanners. The threat of the pandemic revealed the results of the success of our National Library thanks to the automation and electronicization measures implemented in recent years.

The director also made a presentation about other rich document-resource complexes - electronic databases, virtual exhibitions, music library, audio books - which are available to users in a virtual way in the library. The activity of the National Library of Azerbaijan was highly appreciated by CENL members.

At the end, the participants of the conference took a commemorative photo.

The conference will continue its work on June 20.

The conference will be hosted by the National Library of Poland next year.