Schiphol Airport opens new airport library to highlight Dutch culture

25 May 2010 | Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is set to open the world’s first permanent airport library. Starting this summer, travellers can pass their time reading, watching films or listening to music whilst waiting for their flights. The airport library is meant as a place to relax, get inspired and to serve as a showcase of arts and culture in The Netherlands. Visitors can read Dutch literature translated into various languages, browse through photo-books or catalogues from Dutch musea, and view short movies about Dutch arts and culture, such as Dutch Design and the Delta Works. 

The 75 m2 airport library will feature several ‘reading towers’ with (translated) Dutch literature, a reading table equiped with iPads, and there will be laid-back reading chairs and seats with integrated listening devices. Visitors will not be allowed to borrow books, DVDs or other items though. A separate ‘download station’ will be available instead, allowing passengers to download digital content to their personal devices. The library says it hopes travelers will become interested in a specific book or topic when visiting the library and will look it up again once they return home.

The goal of the airport library is to offer foreign transit passengers, who often have to wait several hours in between flights, a way to get into contact with Dutch culture, even when they are only in the country for a few hours in between connecting flights.

Schiphol’s airport library will open at the beginning of July 2010 and will be located air-side beyond passport control at the airport’s intercontinental terminal, next to the airport branch of the Dutch Rijksmuseum. The project is being set-up by the ProBiblio Dutch public library organisation with money from the Dutch ministry of education, culture and science.

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