ENG-1999 — Page 443

RECREATION, SPORTS AND THE ARTS

and a nearby lime kiln were gazetted as monuments in 1981. Despite its remoteness, the museum attracted 67 071 visitors in 1999.

Tak Wah Gallery

The gallery, at Tak Wah Park in Tsuen Wan, was converted from a traditional village dwelling dating from the 1930s, providing a venue for mounting an exhibition on village education. The gallery attracted 96 044 visitors during the year.

Provisional Urban Council Public Libraries

In 1999, the Provisional Urban Council operated the 39 libraries in the urban areas, including the three mobile libraries. The new Ap Lei Chau Library was opened early in the year. Preparation work for the new Sam Ka Tsuen small library is near completion. The Chai Wan Library at Yue Wan Estate will be reprovisioned to a full-scale district library in the new Chai Wan Complex. Planning is under way for the provision of a small library in Fu Shan Estate.

Construction of the Hong Kong Central Library made steady progress. When opened in late 2000, this will be the largest purpose-built public library in Hong Kong and capable of holding two million items of library materials. It will be the principal information and resource centre of the whole library system. New facilities will include a toy library, a young adults library, a central reference library with six subject departments, more than 500 public access microcomputers and multimedia terminals for information and database searches through the telecommunication network and the Internet. Also, there will be a major exhibition gallery on the ground level.

The library collection has grown to 4.31 million books and 339 828 items of audio-visual materials. The total number of registered library users now stands at 1.24 million. The number of items borrowed amounted to 19.8 million in the year.

From June 1999, library users have been able to reserve library materials on the Internet. Both the Hong Kong City Hall Library and the Kowloon Central Library provide computer centres for public use. Audio CDs lending service was launched in March.

Library staff handled more than 566 883 reference enquires, and 1.94 million items of reference materials were consulted in the libraries. The CD-ROM network has been upgraded to provide concurrent access to 56 CD-ROM databases in the Hong Kong City Hall Reference Library from all static libraries. The libraries have stocked up over 7 251 CD-ROMs, including many multimedia and full-text databases. On- line searches of local and overseas catalogues and commercial databases are available through the Internet.

The libraries subscribe to more than 2 600 local and overseas newspapers and periodicals. The Hong Kong City Hall Reference Library is a depository library for nine international organisations.

Outreach programmes continued to form an integral part of the library services. In 1999, the 5th Hong Kong Biennial Awards was presented to encourage local writers in the pursuit of excellence and publication of quality literary works.

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