ST. PETERSBURG — November 15, 2007. We just finished touring the incredible St. Isaac's Cathedral, and we have two hours to rest before leaving at 6:30 for a performance of Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake. This morning we visited the Scientific Library of St. Petersburg State University. The Scientific Library is one of Russia's major research libraries, yet it still occupies only a fraction of the Twelve Collegiums, the university's main building and one of the largest I have ever seen. I did not get the dimensions, but it seems to go on forever.

The Scientific Library is, according to their information guide, "the scientific-methodological (regional) center for the university academic libraries of the Northwest region of Russia (70 libraries). It consults, holds seminars and conferences and organizes apprenticeship for the library managers and staff on different issues of library practice. The Scientific Library of St. Petersburg University carries out the work on forming and using information resources for university community within the frame of national and international programs and projects." Toward that end, the Library invests much time and energy in digitizing many of its rare books and manuscripts.

The library was first established when Empress Catherine the Great purchased more than 1000 volumes from the library of "an educated official," P.F. Zhukov. By 1823 the library held 2,150 titles in 7,748 volumes, thanks primarily to further private gifts from patrons and scientists. From that point on the Russian government made more consistent and concerted efforts to purchase books for the institution, and the library began to grow more rapidly. After the institution adopted a new university charter in 1861 serious efforts were also made to build the manuscript collections. Today the library contains 6.7 million units, including more than 1000 manuscripts in various European languages, and 55 thousand manuscripts in Oriental languages and xylographs.

We met with the library's director as well as the  electronic resources librarian and the special collections librarian. There are 335 librarians and staff members spread among the central library and 22 branches serving various academic departments. We were shown excellent examples of decorated books they had digitized, and they also shared one of the 3 million images they have made of both sides of their card catalog cards. (INSIDE JOKE ALERT: This would make Nicholas Baker happy.) 

As a research library, the Scientific Library subscribes to a great many electronic resources, most of which are familiar to us, such as JSTOR, Scopus, and EBSCO. They like the EBSCO feature that translates entries, but they tend to use the German or Spanish because the Russian version does not come out well. Their electronic resources licenses are negotiated for them by the Russian Consortia (not the exact name, my notes are faulty here), which consists of 400 libraries.

Our discussions also extended to many other aspects of electronic resource management. Given that so many of their resources are kept in closed stacks, the typical European and Russian model, students and faculty are very pleased with how much more quickly they can find journal articles in JSTOR or other e-resource than having to wait for a volume to be retrieved physically.

Despite their large building, of which only a section is library space, the Scientific Library is faced with major book and periodical storage problems. The librarians were very impressed and enthusiastic about my presentation regarding Georgia Southern University's automated retrieval system (ARS). They asked many questions about how much less expensive it is to store books in the ARS compared to other storage options, and how many more items can be stored per square foot as well. I was able to show them a video of the ARS made by Steve Hooley in our library systems department, which illustrated how convenient it is to have the books brought to you in containers rather then your having to retrieve them yourself. Finally, the librarians seemed especially pleased to receive copies of slides showing various ARS images and facts, complete with my presentation notes translated into Russian and displayed in the Cyrillic (sp?) characters. I am very grateful to Professor Grigory Dmitriyev of Georgia Southern's College of Education for helping with the translations.

We concluded our visit with a lengthy conversation about the graying of the library profession in both America and Russia. We were told it is very difficult to attract young people to the profession since the salaries are so low. According to the director, the average librarian salary is so low that most of her librarians stll live with their parents! However, as librarians become increasingly involved with information technology and are perceived as prestigious "information managers," the director hopes more young people will become interested in studying librarianship.

A very impressive library and trio of librarians. It's too bad we did not meet more of their staff. Tomorrow we will meet with officials of the Russian Library Association. Meanwhile, I think I hear the swans gathering... Bede

Bede Mitchell, LAMA President
Dean of the Library, Georgia Southern University

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