Library of Congress

Representatives: Angela Cannon and Roman Yurchenko

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the United States, with over 168 million items. The Library’s collections for the countries of Eastern Europe and Eurasia also are among the largest in the country, because foreign language materials are acquired in all disciplines except clinical medicine and technical agriculture. Especially well represented in area studies are history, belles-lettres, social sciences, art and architecture, biography, and bibliography. Foreign newspapers and periodicals, including specialized serials in the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences, also are systematically collected. Works of a generic nature, such as many textbooks and popularizations of scientific topics, which do not contribute substantively to the body of human knowledge, are sparsely represented.

The size of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian collections is difficult to ascertain, but it is estimated at over 3 million volumes. In addition to printed materials, special format items from or about the region, such as photographs, manuscripts, maps, recordings, and moving images, are scattered throughout the various divisions of the Library. The Library of Congress provides access on-site to many subscription databases with full-text content from almost every country in the region.

With six specialists devoted to reference and collection development for Eastern Europe, the European Reading Room is the primary point of access for researchers interested in the area. Specialists for the non-Slavic vernaculars in Eurasia and the Caucasus work in the African and Middle Eastern Reading Room. The European Reading Room’s home page (http://www.loc.gov/rr/european) provides extensive overviews of individual country collections, finding aids, and an illustrated guide to the European collections as a whole.

With over 40+ staff members in the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate devoted to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian acquisitions and cataloging, the Library acquires many thousands of items in all formats from the region via purchase, exchange, gift, and federal agency transfers, on an annual basis.

The Library of Congress has two co-representatives to the ECC, from the European Division and the Germanic & Slavic Division. The European Division assigns a reference and collection development expert, whereas the Germanic & Slavic Division provides an acquisitions and cataloging specialist, due to the size and complexity of the Library of Congress collections and the large number of staff working in the area.