La donazione was formalized before the notary Lattanzio of Bari on April 5, 1865 and, in 1877, the new institution was opened to the public whose heritage, in the meantime, had reached about 8,500 works in 14,000 volumes.
Additional donations from private individuals had been added to the first donation and especially the acquisition of the libraries of the suppressed convents in the province: Cappuccini, Riformati di San Bernardino e Casa della Missione di Bari, Riformati di Santa Maria degli Angeli di Cassano, Santa Maria di San Luca di Valenzano, Cappuccini di Triggiano, di Rutigliano, di Conversano e di Gravina. These ancient libraries, predominantly religious in nature, but not lacking literary and scientific works, constitute an important documentation of the history of culture in the Terra di Bari. The headquarters of the thus constituted library was in the Palazzo di Città, near the Basilica of San Nicola.
In 1884, in order to improve its operation, the Municipality and the Province of Bari created a consortium for the management of the body which became the Biblioteca Consorziale Sagarriga Visconti Volpi. In 1895 the Library was moved to the ground floor of the Palazzo Ateneo, newly built by the Province, designed by the architect Giacomo Castelli, to house the higher education institutes.
From the end of the 19th century until the 1950s of the last century, the library heritage registered a remarkable growth, attentive to the humanistic disciplines and local history, increased from 1910 with the mandatory deposit of printed materials produced in the province of Bari, enriched by numerous large and small book collections from intellectuals and important Bari families: Giulio Petroni, D’Addosio, Di Cagno Politi, Domenico Zampetta, Andrea Angiulli, Giuseppe De Ninno, Menotti Bianchi, Armando Perotti, De Giosa, de’ Casamassimi, Giovanni Modugno, Raffaele Cotugno, Michele Squicciarini, Vittorio Fiorini, Giuseppe Petraglione, Michele Gervasio.
Starting from 1925, in the history of the Library, the relations with the University, newly founded in the same Palazzo Ateneo, acquired great importance.
In 1958, law no. 330 of March 28 transformed it into a state library with the title of national, expanding its competences and integrating it into a wider cultural circuit. In the 1970s, a radical modernization of the structures, services, and technical-scientific organization was started, orienting the library, also through the purchase of bibliographies and reference works, to position itself as the most important regional bibliographic center, not only because of the importance of the preserved heritage, but for the rigor of the library procedures, the validity of acquisitions, and the preparation of scientific personnel.
In 1992, the life of the Library recorded an important innovation with the adhesion to the SBN project of the Central Institute for the Unified Catalog of Italian Libraries and with the start of the computerization of catalogs, first in telematic connection with the CED of the Naples Polo and then, from June 2002, with the establishment of an autonomous CED and the realization of the SBN Polo Terra di Bari, which made the Library accessible on the web through the Polo Terra di Bari portal. From the second half of the 1990s, a retrospective recovery work began in SBN. The opac of the Terra di Bari library system, which today includes forty-one libraries, currently contains about 490,000 catalog cards.
The New Headquarters of the National Library of Bari
For the National Library of Bari, a new phase has begun with the relocation from the ground floor of Palazzo Ateneo, its historic seat, to the new headquarters within the Cittadella della Cultura, a splendid example of architecture from the 1930s of the last century. This complex was the ancient grain city of Bari managed by the Municipal Company for grain services and included the Municipal Refrigerator, the Municipal Slaughterhouse, and the Fish Market.
Since the summer of 2006, the Library has occupied the former Refrigerator and the former Fish Market, built between the 1920s and 1930s and restored with a conservative and functional intervention by the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities. Both buildings are of fine aesthetic workmanship with references to the Art Nouveau style.
The area available to the Library amounts to about 11,500 square meters: the spaces on the ground floor and mezzanine of the two buildings are intended for book storage, while the entire first floor, connected by a walkway that links them, contains the rooms and areas intended for the public, readers, and visitors.
On the first floor of the former Refrigerator, along with the large reading room, there is an auditorium with 80 seats equipped with adequate technological equipment for conferences and lectures. On the first floor of the Fish Market, two specialized study rooms have been created (manuscripts and rare books, bibliographies, and catalogs).
Both locations are equipped, also on the first floor, with distribution points for library materials coming from the deposits. In the public rooms, about two thousand linear meters of shelving are available to the public, another thousand linear meters of traditional shelving have been created in the two deposits intended for rare and valuable materials and manuscripts. In the book warehouses, an electric compact shelving system has been set up, covering about 18,000 linear meters for book storage, including the mezzanine of the former Fish Market, intended for the horizontal placement of collections of newspapers and large formats.
Telematic stations are installed in all public rooms for consulting the online catalog, digital materials available on the internal network, national and international OPACs, and for internet browsing. In a room on the ground floor, stations equipped for the blind and visually impaired are available.
Finally, on the second floor of the two buildings, the internal offices of the Library have been set up, all connected to the telematic network and sufficiently large and spacious. The structure is served by six elevators, and all spaces are also accessible to people with disabilities.
