The Presidential Library and the Scientific Library of St. Petersburg State University jointly increase their collections

As part of cooperation with the Presidential Library, St. Petersburg State University provides access to its collection of publications, constantly increasing the electronic collections.

Mutually beneficial cooperation between St. Petersburg State University and the Presidential Library has been supported for over ten years. Every year the work to digitize the book collection of St. Petersburg State University is underway. The publications are selected jointly with the specialists of the Presidential Library in accordance with the subject matter of the collections and in the interests of St. Petersburg University. These are mainly works devoted to the history of Russia, law, the Russian language and geography. They are available in electronic format for university students in four virtual rooms of the Presidential Library, opened on the territory of the university, as well as in the electronic archive of St. Petersburg State University and in the Presidential Library’s collections.

Here one has opportunity to learn about the numerous works converted into electronic form on the state and activities of the Imperial St. Petersburg University in the 19th century. The earliest of the editions dates back to 1842, later to 1900. These are the annual ceremonial acts of the St. Petersburg University. In addition, a collection of Russian publications from the collection of the Bestuzhev Courses Library, as well as the archive of the Leningrad University newspaper, were digitized.

Despite the pandemic, the digitization of publications did not stop in 2020. During the period of coronavirus restrictions, about two thousand documents from the collection of the Statistical Office of the Imperial St. Petersburg University were converted to electronic format.

In addition, the joint exhibition activities of the two libraries continued. So, last year, about 335 publications of St. Petersburg State University were provided for exhibiting at exhibitions within the walls of the Presidential Library. Among them were expositions dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Antarctica and the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War. In the same period, a series of video tours dedicated to the Bestuzhev courses was developed.

In 2021, more than 230 legal works were transferred to the library for digitization, as well as 250 editions of the 19th-20th centuries on topics such as the history of the Russian literary language, Russian in dialects and the history of science. Of particular interest were the works devoted to the spelling reform of the Russian language.

This year the exposition The Northern Route: The Arctic in Russian Literature and Art stands out among the joint projects. 70 editions were selected from the book collection of St. Petersburg State University. Among them are works of art telling about the traditions of the life of the peoples of the North and the wealth of the Arctic. The History of the Philharmonic Society in the Collection of the Musical Library was the title of the exhibition, which included the works of the Soviet musicologist, student of Petrograd University Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, whose fate was inextricably linked with the Leningrad Philharmonic.

The work on scanning handwritten workbooks was also completed and is based on the Pskov Regional Dictionary with Historical Data - from 1967 to 2018, 27 printed editions of the dictionary were published, more than 60 thousand words were detailed.

In the near future, the Presidential Library plans to digitize the archive of the Judicial Practice of the Supreme Court of the USSR, decisions of the civil and criminal cassation departments of the Governing Senate, as well as publications from the personal library of the Soviet linguist, founder of the Leningrad Phonological School, Doctor of Philology Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba.