New Library Services

The Library at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, SSEES merged with UCL on the 1st August. The Library holds one of the most important research collections in Britain on Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It comprises over 340,000 volumes of books, pamphlets and periodicals. The most extensive collection relates to Russia (some 90,000 volumes of books and pamphlets), but the collections on Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia are also substantial.

There are smaller collections on Bulgaria, Finland, Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, the Finno-Ugarian languages and general Slavonic culture and history. The emphasis of the collections is on the languages, culture, literature, history and the economic, geographic, political and social structures and dynamics of the region. The status of the Library nationally was recognised in 1995 by the award of substantial sums under the Follett funding round for cataloguing books. The Library has also been successful under the Research Support Libraries Programme in gaining funding for a collaborative collection management project with the Universities of Oxford, Glasgow and the British Library. Among other activities this will involve the creation of a website allowing researchers to locate important research material in British collections from their desktops.

The Library also provides IT and audio-visual services to members of the School alongside traditional printed materials and since 1995 the School's web server, run by the Library, has provided a widely used directory of Internet resources on the region. This can be found at:

http://www.ssees.ac.uk/dirctory.htm

The links are selected by the Library's area specialist staff, who use their subject and language knowledge to find sites that match the School's academic profile. The Library is currently working on several projects with UCL's Computer Science Department on video-conferencing technology, experimenting with transmitting seminars via the Internet.

Further information from l.pitman@ssees.ac.uk

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