One of the first achievements of the Skoufas Association since its foundation in April 1896 was establishing a library in Arta. In July 1896, letters were sent to the University of Athens, to the "PARNASSOS" Association and to all the people of Arta who wanted to donate books. The first donations were made and the foundations were laid for the establishment of the Library. In the years that followed, efforts were made to enrich the Library, with old and new publications. Many of our fellow citizens, named and anonymous, have donated books ever since.
The first donations to the Library came from the members of the first Board of Directors, Theod. Thomopoulos, the Association "PARNASSOS", the Association "MIKROS OMILOS" (after its dissolution in 1927 its library was offered to the Association), the lawyer K. Anagnostopoulos (in 1962 he donated to the Library a large series of legal books in Greek and foreign languages), the Society of Continental Studies, the Eugenides Foundation and Emporiki Bank. Eumorfia Kotzioula, Haril. Bletsos and Michalis Peranthis also offered books. The library of the poet Kostas Krystallis enriched our shelves. A major donor to the Library is Petros Garoufalias, who donated a large number of books in foreign languages and in Greek. Furthermore, Ioannis Papavasiliou donated a remarkable series of books of great intellectual value.
Among the major donors are the family of Giannis Banias, who donated 1,451 book titles to the Library from his personal library, Mr. Dimitris Tomboulidis, who has so far donated over 2,000 book titles for the Pontic and Asia Minor Hellenism department along with archival material, Mr. Kon/nos Tsiligiannis, who gave the Association his personal Library and photographic material, as well as the family Dim. Portovara. Various authors also sent poems, short stories or whatever they had published. The Ministry of Education has also provided a large number of valuable publications.
In 1991 the Board of Directors of the "SKOUFAS" Association hired a graduate Librarian in order to properly organize the Library. In 1992, the Library was moved to the ground floor of Garoufalia's house, on Apokaykou Street 1, which belongs to the ELEI of Arta. In the same year, a small reading room was created and the organization of the Library begins according to international standards. More than 30.000 books have since been catalogued using a Dewey variant in the Library's legacy database.
In 2019, a volunteer effort was started to modernise its ageing cataloguing system. The legacy DBF database was reverse engineered and a long effort to clear the results of years of labor from inconsistencies caused by the limitations of the format was started. That work can be tracked in the skoufas-dbf-reader GitHub project. In 2022, a second volunteed project was started to allow the personnel of the libary to make use of more modern technologies, as a stepping stone towards a full-fledged electronic libary solution. The code for that project, the website you're reading now, can be found in the skoufas-library GitHub project.
We welcome feedback and volunteer contributions to the code! Please email rockdreamer at gmail dot com for more information.
Currently the Library operates a lending service for most of its books, except for rare books and manuscripts. Access to the latter must be agreed and coordinated beforehand. Please contact us for more information. It is enrolled in the ATLAS program of the Universities of Greece and DASTA for the TEI. Its MARC Org Code is GR-ArMPA (Id 43410).
Some of the rare publications available in the Library of the SKOUFAS Association are:
Rare Manuscripts:
Publications of the SKOUFAS Association: