Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies (SEEES) is an area of research librarianship for
which inter-institutional cooperation is uniquely critical. SEEES represents a vast, ethnically and
linguistically diverse territory that has a long history of labile geopolitical boundaries and
linguistic and cultural interpenetration: the territory of the fourteen countries of Central and
Eastern Europe and the fifteen former Soviet Republics, including the Russian Republic. This
makes SEEES extremely challenging as an area studies librarianship construct — one that
encompasses roughly thirty countries and as many languages from several different language
families, including Slavic, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Caucasian, and Romance. The collecting
and research-support challenges associated with this far-flung geography and linguistic diversity
are compounded by other factors: a steady increase in the volume of the region’s publishing
output; the proliferation of new-media publication and distribution structures; the intensifying
interdisciplinarity and omnivorousness of research focused on the region and the attendant
explosive expansion of the definition of research-valuable source material. No single institution
has the capacity — measured in purchasing power, physical and virtual storage space, or
expertise — to adequately service the present and future needs of North American research on
this region. Increasingly, that mandate is beyond the reach of even the most powerful interinstitutional cooperative collecting enterprises.
As a dedicated body for SEEES librarian specialists, the ECC serves critical professional
functions beyond the scope of institutional collectives with more localized collection
development and sharing mandates. The ECC collective cuts across multiple overlapping
consortia, as well as across institutional categories and geographic boundaries that ordinarily
contain inter-institutional cooperatives. The participation of the Library of Congress, North
America’s largest single SEEES collector, and the University of Toronto, the center of SEEES
collecting in Canada — along with seven Ivy League libraries, New York Public Library, Duke,
UNC Chapel Hill, and NYU — constitutes the North American collective best positioned for the
higher-level coordination of the work of other collectives, with a view to ensuring a breadth and
depth of SEEES collecting and research support unachievable by any of the more localized
consortia in isolation. The meetings of the SEEES collection builders and research facilitators
representing these twelve institutions are occasions for the highest-level address of the shifting
challenges of SEEES collection building, collection description, and research support in the
service of rapidly evolving research and teaching. The librarians who serve on the ECC bring
diverse, mutually complementary regional-linguistic and disciplinary expertise to these meetings,
and the participants in these exchanges are exceptionally well positioned to negotiate the volatile
and often challenging landscape of suppliers of materials, in all formats, that are potentially
valuable documents for a diversifying and evolving North American SEEES research agenda.