Electronic resources of the biggest Russian libraries for all

Five biggest Russian libraries are creating a virtual summary catalogue of their bibliographic descriptions and full-text electronic resources. The project was presented on Tuesday in the State Duma (the Lower House of the Russian Parliament).

The project, being coordinated by the British Council, which is financed by the British Foreign Office, is aimed at forming a consortium, which will include the Russian State Library, the Russian National Library, the All-Russian State Library of Foreign Literature, the Parliamentary Library and the Scientific Library of the Lomonosov Moscow State University.

The European Commission also takes part in the project.

Speaking at the presentation ceremony, the head of the State Duma apparatus, Alexander Lotyrev, underscored that the aim of the project is to help a closer integration of human and electronic resources of these libraries into the European library network.

In her turn, Barbara Morganti, one of the chiefs of the project, underscored that a virtual catalogue will make it possible for the Internet users to simultaneously look through the catalogues of the partners' libraries, which contain more than three million bibliographic descriptions, and to get access to the electronic resources, that is, full texts of dissertations, books, periodicals, lectures, map collections, and so on.

Barbara Morganti noted that the libraries were working in cooperation with the National Library of Scotland, the Prussian State Library in Berlin and the Italian National Library in Rome.