A special meeting devoted to the Presidential Library at the ASEEES Conference

17 to 20 November 2011 in Washington is held the 43th annual conference of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). The conference is attended by over 1400 specialists from different countries of the world.

18 November was held a special meeting devoted to the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. The meeting was attended by 34 members of the conference – librarians, researchers, managers. The meeting was presided by the Head of Slavic Department of the Harvard University Library Bradley Sheffner.

The specialists of the library told about the activities of the institution and perspectives of development. The paper of E. B. Gruznova was devoted to presentation of official documents of the national government bodies of pre-revolution, Soviet and modern period in the collections of the Presidential Library. A. V. Zaitsev delivered the paper where he defined the main areas of development of the Internet portal of the library and methods of organization of online access to its electronic resources.

After the lectures, the audience asked questions about plans to increase the number of documents of the Soviet period in electronic collections of the library, about centralization of the digitization process in Russia and development of the system of electronic reading rooms of the library in different countries. The attendees were also interested which are the ways of solution of the problem of obsolescence of formats of digital resources preservation according to the Presidential Library’s specialists.

The Chief of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in the Culpepper Patrick Loughney made an address on the interaction of the Library of Congress, the Affairs Management Department of the President of the Russian Federation, the Presidential Library and the Russian Gosfilmofond regarding return to the USA of digital copies of lost American films.

The results were summed up the Head of the European Reading Room, Library of Congress, Grant Harris. He expressed hope that the attendees were given the exhaustive information about the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library and major areas of its activities.