College and Research Libraries -By C. BICKFORD O'BRIEN Russian Libraries- The Door Swings Open I NTERNATIONAL TENSIONS of the last year, as everyone knows, have given little hope of improved relations between the world powers. Yet in spite of the latest misunderstandings and problems, there is reason to believe that some progress is being made toward a clearer under- standing of differing points of view. One evidence of this is the fact that for the first time in about twenty years hundreds of Americans have been permitted to enter the Soviet Union. In theory, Amer- ican travelers have never been complete- ly barred from going to Russia, even during the height of the Cold War, but travel restrictions and other impediments have kept the number infinitesimal and the area of visitation in the Soviet Union highly circumscribed. With the partial lifting of restrictions in 1955, the picture has rapidly changed. A whole new generation of Americans, many of them specialists in the humani- ties and social sciences, and well equipped linguistically for exchanges with the Russians, have been permitted to roam far and wide within the borders of the Soviet Union, note books, type- writers, and cameras in tow. With the aid of travel grants and the blessings of both govern1nents, they have learned more about Russia than at any time since the end of World War II. The results of this overseas expedition between the two countries may have far-reaching conse- quences for future relations, and there is hope, at least, that it will remove even further some of the misconceptions that Dr. 0' Brien is associate professor of history} University of California (Davis). MAY} 1957 persist on both sides of the iron curtain. In June, 1956, I found myself among the early arrivals in Leningrad starting on a month's tour of the Soviet Union. My principal purpose was to investigate several of the Russian history collections in the larger libraries, to meet a few of the well-known Soviet historians in my field, and, of course, to see something of the country. It was far from the ideal situation in terms of the time allotted. However, in view of a more extensive European trip the previous year, devoted to examining Russian book collections in other countries, I felt that even so brief an introduction would be valuable. The trip was in many ways an eye- opener. The size, quality, and general atmosphere of the larger libraries I vis- ited in Leningrad, Kiev, and Moscow was impressive. Being familiar with Rus- sian historiography of the pre-Revolu- tionary era, I had anticipated sizable collections of pre-Revolutionary Russian contributions to the social sciences and humanities; but I was unprepared for the vastness and the broad European character of the materials that are avail- able-the manuscripts, incunabula, rare books--many pertaining to Western Europe and the Near East. The excel- lent condition and careful cataloging of these works was also unexpected. Enter- ing these libraries for the first time gave me the same feeling of awe experienced upon my first visit to the great art col- lection of the Hermitage in Leningrad- that here were rich and little-known treasures in untold quantity. The scale of these collections is commensurate with the physical size of the Soviet Union. The number of libraries in the Soviet 217 Union must be numbered in the thou- sands-~50,000, according to the British publication, The World of Learning.l Most of these are comparable to Amer- ican community and county libraries, but there are also large public libraries in each of the Republics, as well as great central repositories in Leningrad and Moscow. It was these latter libraries and the State University Library in Kiev that most attracted me. The atmosphere of these larger librar- ies in Leningrad, Kiev, and Moscow dif- fers very little from that of the great libraries in Paris, Vienna, Stockholm, and Helsinki. They are used almost ex- clusively by the advanced student and academician. The rare book collections exist primarily for the scholar. The use of manuscript and archival collections is limited almost entirely to the profes- sional scholar. While university students also use the larger libraries, one sees fewer of them than in the reading rooms of university and public libraries of the United States. Gaining admission to these libraries is a formal process, requiring credentials, identification cards-usually with photo- graph attached-and frequent encoun- ters with guards and library officials. While use of manuscript materials re- quires less ceremony than in France, for example, the surveillance of anyone us- ing manuscripts is no less rigid. Never- theless, the visitor gains access to sources more rapidly than in many Western European libraries-perhaps because readers and scholars make more limited use of the library and archival materials. Furthermore, it takes less time to obtain materials from the stacks, and a reader is permitted to examine more material in a single day than in London, Paris, or Rome. The staffs of the main libraries in Len- ingrad, Kiev, and Moscow seem capable 1 Europa Publications, Ltd. The World of Learning, 1955. 6th ed. (London: 1955), p.746. and well informed. Institutes for librar- ians and for historian-archivists in Len- ingrad and Moscow have kept the stand- ard high. Many staff members are schol- ars in their own right, carrying on active research programs in addition to their library responsibilities. They are highly skilled in the arts of paleography, diplo- matics, and sphragistics. And, on the per- sonal level, they are helpful to the for- eign scholar and patient with his awk- wardness in working with catalogs or with registers of documents and manu- scripts. The Saltykov-Shchedrin ·Public Li- brary of Leningrad is the largest of some eleven major libraries in the city. With its volumes numbered in millions,2 its large collection of incunabula, manu- scripts, Aldines, rare books from .Western Europe, musical scores, and Hebraica, this is truly one of the great collections of the world. Age and the rugged war years have brought it to a serious state of disrepair, and its enormous contents and vast size have created a serious prob- lem of renovation for the library admin- istration. Even in disrepair, however, its faded neoclassic architecture and decor, its lofty stacks, its acres of parquetry floors retain the splendor of an earlier day. The collection of books in foreign languages, foreign periodicals, and print- ed documentary rna terial is very incom- plete-in some cases shockingly so-but the Director of the Library and his as- sistants are aware of these gaps and look forward to correcting them. This condi- tion, however, is not peculiar to Russia -it is shared by many world-famous li- braries in Western Europe. The materials of the library appear to have been carefully cataloged in sev- eral large files, rather than the single central file that we are accustomed to. As in most European libraries, items in 2 The W orld of L earning estimates its size at over 10 ,0 00,000, including a large collection of incunabula and MSS. This fi gure is confirmed by the Report of th e Librarian of Co n gr ess, 1955. 218 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES the catalog frequently appear in long- the Ukranian S.S.R. These collections hand, and many of the cards have be- were smaller than I had anticipated, par- come faded and worn. Each item I ex- ticularly after seeing those in Leningrad. amined, however, gave complete infor- The Shevchenko State Library has ap- mation, and the majority of the cards proximately a half million volumes, most were typewritten. In quality, the catalog of which pertain to the natural sciences compared favorably with those of the and agricultural sciences. There is a Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the notable lack of foreign literature. The Vatican Library. library of the Institute of History is lit- The staff of the Saltykov-Shchedrin tie more than a working library, al- Library are men of learning and cour- though it includes a number of out-of- tesy. They readily gave me access to rna- print items and a growing collection of terials and helped me in the compilation historical materials on microfilm, some of a lengthy bibliography, for I found of which have been gathered from Polish here much to my purpose. Nor did their and Czech sources. Much of the valuable cooperation stop with the end of my material on early Ukranian history, lit- visit. My time was so limited that I was erature, and the arts has been transferred unable to complete the listing of titles to Moscow. The size of the Kiev librar- pertaining to my research topic. When I ies, I was told, did not compare favorably mentioned this to the assistant-director, with the larger collections in Kazan, he volunteered to have it completed for Lvov, and Tbilisi. me, and I accepted the offer gratefully In Kiev as in Leningrad, the library but with some skepticism. Within two staff were men and women of high pro- months after my return home, however, fessional caliber. Many of them are pro- I was agreeably surprised to receive the ductive scholars, hard-working and dedi- completed bibliography, carefully type- cated to their tasks. Several of them are written. members of the Kiev Academy of Science. As I mentioned earlier, Leningrad also Since the output of publications of the boasts a number of sizable libraries de- Kiev Academy exceeds that of most voted to the social and natural sciences, American university presses, their pro- the fine arts, and the applied arts. The duction is impressive. The staff of the Library of the Academy of Sciences, Institute of History I would judge to founded in 1714, has a large collection of number around thirty. They were cor- books and manuscripts pertaining to dial, communicative, and highly inter- mathematics and the natural sciences. ested in learning of the training, status, The library of the State Hermitage Mu- and research interests of American schol- seum is strong in the graphic arts and ars. On one occasion I found myself in art history. Some of the institutes, such a small auditorium filled with historians as the Institute of History of the Acad- and graduate students, facing a barrage emy of Sciences, also have imposing li- · . of questions about American libraries, braries. Professor M. P. Viatkin of the scholarship, the research interests of Academy of Sciences showed me part of American scholars in the Slavic field, and the collection on history, which has many so on. While many of the questions rare books and works that are difficult to showed a wariness of Western scholar- obtain in the United States. ship and publications, particularly as From Leningrad I journeyed to Kiev they relate to Russia, my questioners to inspect the libraries of Shevchenko also manifested undisguised wonder at State University and of the Institute of the scope of interest in Russian studies History of the Academy of Sciences of in the United States and particularly MAY;> 1957 219 that much of our research extends to periods other than the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary epochs. Hope was strongly expressed that some kind of enduring tie might be formed with scholars of the West and that the ex- change of library materials might in- crease. The volume of Soviet research devoted to the social sciences and arts is well known in the United States. Since 1954- the three-hundredth anniversary of the union of the Ukraine with the Grand Principality of 1\tloscow-an avalanche of publications relating to Ukranian his- tory and art has emanated from the Kiev Academy. In other Union republics as well, the intensive subsidized research of Russian scholars has greatly strained the stack space of regional libraries and add- ed new space problems for central reposi- tories in Moscow and Leningrad. The cataloging, housing, and general care of this plethora of materials poses serious problems for the Russian librarian, as it also does for the American librarian who receives even a small portion of the total output. Moscow, like Leningrad, is another centre of huge libraries. The Lenin State Library, the Fundamental Library of the Social Sciences, the State Public Histori- cal Library, and the Library of the Uni- versity of Moscow are the foremost for the humanities and social sciences. The Lenin Library is the central repository for books in the Soviet Union, the equiv- alent of the U. S. Library of Congress or France's Bibliotheque Nationale. My .. time in Moscow was devoted primarily to exploring its contents. This Library, as is widely known, was the former Rumi- anstev Library, founded in 1865 and re- organized and enlarged after Lenin's death. Rare items and collections have, over the years, been gradually and sur- reptitiously transferred to this repository from all parts of the Soviet Union, and it is now unquestionably the number one Slavic library of the world. The Lenin Library is housed in many great buildings, which, for all their im- posing size and number, lack the gran- deur of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad. Gaining admittance here took more time and effort than at the other libraries I visited, but once a per- mit was granted, admission was fairly automatic. Only occasionally thereafter did a curious guard insist on more iden- tification than was shown on my library permit. The collection is larger than that of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad and has been estimated at more than 15,000,000 volumes and peri- odicals and 2,500,000 manuscripts. The collection of early Slavonic works is par- ticularly large, and there are important collections of rare books, including in- cunabula and Aldines. The library of Russian pre-Revolutionary publications is tremendous-so comprehensive that it would be difficult to think of a Rus- sian work in the field of the social sci- ences that was unavailable. As in other libraries of the Soviet Union, the books of the Lenin Library are in excellent condition and have been carefully cata- loged. The physical condition of many of the catalogs, however, again compares unfavorably with those in American li- braries, as is true also of the larger li- braries in France and England. The manuscript collection of the Lenin Library has been housed in a separate building about two blocks from the main library. Materials from the manuscript section are conveyed to the central library by underground trolley in a matter of minutes, or they can be consulted in the small, quiet reading rooms of the manuscripts building. In general, the organization of manuscripts is like that in libraries elsewhere in Europe. Most of them are contained in folios, somewhat loosely arranged. The casual way in which they are kept, which 220 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES . ~ also makes them difficult to handle, is somewhat astonishing, considering their extraordinary value. One wonders how much longer such aged documents can endure under such treatment. Their -cat- aloging al~o seems somewhat informal. Most of the registers of documents were compiled in longhand before the Rev- olution. No attempt has been made to have them typewritten or printed. In addition to the manuscripts divi- sion of the Lenin Library, great quan- tities of documentary materials are pre- served in various archival collections. The Academy of Sciences has probably the most important large collection of archival materials. Other libraries in Moscow, as well as government agencies, have manuscript materials that one nor- mally might expect to find in a central archives. It would take months, if not longer, to locate and examine this mate- rial, if, indeed, one were permitted to do so. In my very limited perusal of manuscript materials in Moscow, how- ever~ I felt there might be fewer obsta- cles to overcome than one might expect in the use of such material. Some of the documentary material I asked for in Moscow, for example, was microfilmed and forwarded to me in the United States without apparent difficulty. From these initial views of large li- braries in Russia, I acquired a new ap- preciation of their vast contents. In all fields related to Russia or to Slavic stu- dies they are still the primary collections. Valuable as are the Russian book collec- tions in Washington, Paris, Helsinki, Rome, and elsewhere, they represent only a fraction of the materials extant in the central libraries of the Soviet Union. If Russian history, literature, the arts, and sciences are to be re-examined critically and definitively in future, these great source collections must be utilized. It can only be hoped that the door which was partially open in 1955 will remain unclosed-b~tter still that it will some day swing wide permanently. Summer Seminars at Cleveland The School of Library Science of Western Reserve University, in cooperation with the Cleveland Public Library and the Special Libraries Association, announces two special summer seminars. The first w.ill be held July 29 to August 2; the second, August 5 to August 9. Four courses will be conducted during the day each week. In the evenings there will be open sessions of a practical problems clinic, as desired, for considera- tion of specific problems suggested by the participants, topics to be scheduled in advance and notice circulated to all registrants. Two ten-hour and two five-hour courses will be conducted each week. During the first week, the ten-hour courses will be, "Technical Libraries and Information Centers" and "Documentary Survey," and the five-hour courses will be, "Machine Aids to Librarianship" and "Report Writing." During the second week, the ten-hour courses will be, "Theory of Classi- fication" and "Machine Literature Searching," and the five-hour courses will be, "Operation Research and the Library" and "Technical Editing." For other information, including that on tuition, write Jesse H. Shera, dean, School of Library Science, Western Reserve University, 11161 East ·Boulevard, Cleveland 6, Ohio. MAY, 1957 221