Russian State Library (RSL). RGB dissertations for free! Other disciplines library named after Lenin
The Russian State Library is the largest public library in the country and one of the largest in the world. It will take 79 years just to scroll through the publications stored here for a minute, and this is without breaks for sleep, lunch and other needs. Since 1862, all publications published in Russian have been sent to the library. Despite the fact that since 1992 the official name of the institution has been the "Russian State Library", many still call it the Lenin Library. This name can still be seen on the facade of the building.
Photos of the library. Lenin
History of the library. Lenin
The library was founded in 1862, the funds were replenished both at the expense of the libraries of St. Petersburg, and through the efforts of Muscovites who donated valuable manuscripts and publications. Since 1921, the library has become a national book depository. Three years later, the institution was named after Lenin, by which it is widely known to this day.
The construction of the new library building, where it is located to this day, began in 1924. The authors of the project are Vladimir Gelfreikh and Vladimir Shchuko. This is a magnificent example of Stalinist Empire architecture. The building with its numerous columns remotely resembles ancient Roman temples; it is a very large-scale and beautiful building, a real palace. A number of buildings were completed much later, in 1958.
Monument to Dostoevsky near the library. Lenin
In 1997, a monument to Fyodor Dostoevsky was erected near the library, the sculpture was created by Alexander Rukavishnikov. The monument does not look majestic. The writer is depicted sitting, slightly hunched over, his face is sad and thoughtful.
How to enroll in the Lenin Library
Opening hours of the Lenin Library
From 9:00 to 20:00 from Monday to Friday, from 9:00 to 19:00 on Saturday, Sunday and the last Monday of the month - days off. The working hours of each of the reading rooms are published on the official website of the library.
Where is it located and how to get there
The main building of the library is located in the very heart of Moscow, next to. Directly in front of it is the metro station "Library named after Lenin", there are also stations "Aleksandrovsky Sad", "Borovitskaya" and "Arbatskaya" nearby. Also nearby is the bus stop and trolleybus "Alexander Garden".
Address: Moscow, st. Vozdvizhenka, 3/5. Website:
July 1, 2012 marks the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Russian State Library.
The Moscow Public Library (now the Russian State Library, or RSL) was founded on July 1 (June 19, old style), 1862.
The fund of the Russian State Library originates from the collection of Count Nikolai Rumyantsev (1754-1826), which included more than 28 thousand books, 710 manuscripts, more than 1000 maps. The collection belonged to the private museum of the count, created by him in St. Petersburg. After the death of Rumyantsev, his brother turned to Emperor Nicholas I with a request to accept as a gift and transfer to the government the museum and library with manuscript and book collections. By decree of the emperor, the museum became known as the Rumyantsev Museum.
The St. Petersburg period in the history of the Rumyantsev Museum and its library ended in 1861, when, on the initiative of Muscovites who wanted to organize a public library in the city, it was decided to transfer the collection to Moscow. The library was housed in a building built by the Russian architect Vasily Bazhenov next to the Kremlin at the end of the 18th century and known as the Pashkov House.
This building belongs to the library to this day. Department of Manuscripts, where 600 thousand written and graphic monuments are stored, the oldest of which date back to the 7th century. There is also a department of musical publications and sound recordings and a cartographic department.
The official founding date of the Russian State Library is July 1, 1862, when the state and budget of the library were approved by decree of Emperor Alexander II, and the receipt by the library of one obligatory copy of all printed materials published in Russia was legalized. In addition to obligatory receipts, the library fund was replenished by gifts and donations. Thus, the collection of books of the Minister of Public Education Avraam Norov donated to the library consisted of 16,000 books. This collection includes editions of Greek and Roman writers, works by Machiavelli, a unique collection of Giordano Bruno's lifetime editions with an autograph on one of the books, Russian scientific monographs of the first half of the 19th century - the collection is still one of the most valuable in the fund libraries.
Hundreds of collections, individual books, manuscripts came to the library from donors, among whom were the merchant and publisher Kozma Soldatenkov, scientist Fyodor Chizhov, bibliophile and musicologist Vladimir Odoevsky, Alexander Pushkin's son Alexander, Leo Tolstoy's daughter Sophia and many others.
For almost a century, from the end of the 20s of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20s of the 20th century (in the St. Petersburg and Moscow periods), the library functioned as part of a complex that kept the name of the Rumyantsev Museum unchanged in its official names.
The library of the Moscow Public and Rumyantsev Museums has become a true center of culture. Artistic works and scientific works were created in its reading rooms. The readers of the library were Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Korolenko.
On January 29, 1992, by decree of the President of Russia, the State Library of the USSR named after V.I. Lenin was transformed into the Russian State Library (RSL).
In the second half of the 1990s, automated bibliographic search systems began to be used in the work of the library and electronic catalogs were created.
The Russian State Library is a member of the UNESCO "Memory of the World" program, designed to protect the world's documentary heritage and, to the extent possible, provide wide access to it. In 1997, on the proposal of the RSL, several library collections and individual books recognized as world documentary heritage were included in the international register "Memory of the World": the Arkhangelsk Gospel of 1092, the Gospel of Khitrovo, Slavic editions of the Cyrillic font of the 15th century, a collection of maps of the Russian Empire of the 18th century, Russian posters of the late XIX - early XX centuries.
In 2000, the main book depository of the library was closed for reconstruction, which was connected, among other things, with the need for its technical re-equipment. In 2003, the reconstruction was completed, but this did not solve the problem of lack of space to accommodate the library fund. The possibilities of its storage facilities were already exhausted by the beginning of the 80s of the twentieth century. Since then, the library has been replenished annually with 300 - 500 thousand publications.
In 2007, the construction of a new building of the RSL was included in the list of buildings and facilities for federal needs for 2008-2010 by order of the Government of the Russian Federation.
The new building of the Russian State Library behind the main building, on Vozdvizhenka Street. Construction is expected to start this year, 2012.
Within the walls of the Russian State Library there is a unique collection of domestic and foreign documents in 367 languages of the world. The volume of the fund exceeds 43 million items. There are specialized collections of maps, notes, sound recordings, rare books, dissertations, newspapers and other types of publications.
I was contacted by the RSL and offered to make a report about our main library, of course, I happily agreed.
Within the walls of the Russian State Library there is a unique collection of domestic and foreign documents in 367 languages of the world. There are specialized collections of maps, sheet music, sound recordings, rare books, dissertations, newspapers and other types of publications. The library grants the right to use its reading rooms to all citizens of Russia and other countries who have reached the age of 18. About 200 new readers sign up here every day. Almost 4 thousand people come to the RSL every day, and virtual reading rooms located in 80 cities of Russia and neighboring countries serve more than 8 thousand visitors daily.
Today is the first part of a big story about the Russian State Library. In it you will learn how to borrow a book from the library, look at the vaults and the secret underground passage to the Kremlin.
01. First you need to come to the metro station. "Library them. Lenin. It will never be renamed. Previously, the RSL (Russian State Library) was also called the “Library. Lenin. To get into the library you need to have a library card, it is made in the second entrance. With you in your hand: passport, student (if a student) and 100 rubles for a photo. We fill out the questionnaire, press the button "electronic queue". The ticket comes out. Take it in your hands - it's yours. Numbers are lit on the scoreboard above special small cabinets. Wait for yours and come in. There, a specially trained woman will take your questionnaire and take a picture. You need to immediately decide on the reading room where you will be given books. It is not very clear how to do this without seeing the halls. In 5 minutes the plastic card will be ready. It takes no more than 10 minutes to get a library card.
02. Login. The RSL is guarded by a special police regiment. Turnstiles are one of the latest innovations in the library, which, however, was ambiguously perceived by readers. Access is by barcode on the library card. It is impossible to pass with books, cameras and large bags, they need to be done in a storage room.
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04. If you already have a list of references - that is, you know exactly what books you need, feel free to step into the hall of the card catalog.
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06. The funds of Leninka contain more than 43 million items of storage. There are specialized collections of maps, notes, sound recordings, rare books, dissertations, newspapers and other types of publications.
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08. There are always consultants in the hall who will help you navigate through a huge amount of information.
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11. After you have found the book you need in the catalog, you need to get a demand sheet from the consultant.
12. And rewrite all the information about the book into it.
13. For advanced readers, racks with an electronic catalog of the RSL have been installed. I honestly tried to take something from Pushkin...
14. I must have been too worried because I got a book about potatoes. By the way, since at present the process of transferring a paper catalog to an electronic form has not yet been completed, it does not have all the books, so many people are looking in the old fashioned way in a file cabinet.
16. Once every 15 minutes, a pneumatic mail operator comes for the sheets of demand.
17. The operator is hiding from prying eyes behind this cabinet.
18. And here is the pneumatic mail point itself. The system was installed in the library back in the 70s.
19. The sheet is folded, placed in the “cartridge” and sent to the storage tier where the book you ordered is located. For this, ciphers on cards are needed.
21. By the way, a demand sheet is not always put in the cartridge. It can be used to send cigarettes, a pen or a love note. Before the new year, employees like to send sweets.
22. This is how the scheme of the receiving-departure station looks like.
23. Pneumomail channels descend into the cellars of the library. By the way, this is a secret passage to the Kremlin, but they asked not to write about it.
24. This is a pneumatic mail repairman. Sometimes negligent employees try to pass prohibited items (for example, pens), the cartridge can open and then, in order to find and remove the handle, you have to allow pipes. Often the caps just fly off the cartridges, it is also problematic to get them.
25. In the early 90s, this miracle machine was installed. They say she can beat Kasparov at chess, but now she simply manages the entire pneumatic mail network in the RSL.
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27. So, while your request is being processed, which is about 2 hours, you can go have fun.
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29. For example, you can read periodicals - the RSL has all the magazines that are sold in print kiosks - including for the current month. You can do this in the reading room of periodicals.
30. Five visitors open the doors of the Library every minute.
31. According to the “Law on the legal deposit of documents, the Russian State Library is the place of storage of the legal deposit of all printed materials published in Russia.
32. There is also an excellent canteen in the RSL. Some come here just to drink tea in a warm comfortable environment. Tea costs 13 rubles, but boiling water is free, some "readers" use this. By the way, the smell in the dining room does not allow you to stay there for too long.
33. While you are drinking tea and absorbing the aromas of home cooking, your request is being processed in the book depository.
34. The total length of the RSL bookshelves is about 275 kilometers.
35. The ceilings are very low, once there was a case when a worker received a concussion, she was taken to the hospital.
36. There is a story in the RSL that the ghost of Nikolai Rubakin lives in storage. At night, when the floors are locked and sealed with wax seals, the night watchmen hear someone walking, footsteps are clearly audible, doors open and close. Perhaps the fact is that in his will Rubakin indicated that he bequeathed his entire personal collection (which is 75,000 books) to the Lenin Library. They did so after his death. Only together with the books they brought an urn with his ashes and for some time it was kept here. Well, what is a personal collection - it's a part of the soul, pencil marks in the margins, folded pages and a lot of thoughts. Rubakin was buried in Moscow, but his ghost continues to roam the floors... perhaps turning pages, rearranging books...
37. Rubakin - the creator of bibliopsychology - the science of text perception. Author of the book "Psychology of the reader and the book." Developed the ideas of Emile Ennequin, author of Estopsychology. His ideas are widely used in psycholinguistics.
38. "Note" is received by storage workers, they take your book and send it to the reading room with the help of conveyors. There are two conveyors in the RSL: the vertical one was designed by Sukhanov in the 70s.
39. Large chain conveyor, put into operation in 1953.
40. “This is a metro construction, there are the same gears as on escalators in the subway.” Nevertheless, it is high time to replace the mechanism with a much more modern analogue. But, as the general director of the RSL explained, in order to introduce a new technical system, the conveyor must be stopped, and this threatens that the activity of the entire Library will actually be paralyzed. Only with the commissioning of a new building will it become possible to replace the conveyor.
41. There is also a small version of the chain conveyor. To store 41,315,500 copies, premises with an area equal to 9 football fields are used, and there are 29,830 storage copies for each librarian.
42. In 1987, the fund of the Special Storage Department consisted of about 27,000 domestic books, 250,000 foreign books, 572,000 issues of foreign magazines, and about 8,500 annual sets of foreign newspapers. These books and magazines could not be obtained by an ordinary reader.
43. Books from the repository are waiting for readers.
44. You can't take books home. For reading in the RSL there are 37 reading rooms for 2238 seats, of which 437 are computerized.
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46. Reading room No. 3 is the largest, it is a kind of visiting card of the RSL, you can come into it with your laptop, there are dictionaries on the side shelves, for example, ancient Greek-Russian.
47. You can make a copy of a book, it costs 6 rubles per page, but you can’t take pictures. No one really explained the reason for the ban on photography, there was something incomprehensible about copyright, then about the fact that books are spoiling. It seems to me that the copier ruins books more than the camera, and if people are allowed to take pictures, for example, illustrations, they will be cut out less and pages will be torn out.
48. Indicators of one day:
- registration of new users (including new users of EDL virtual reading rooms) - 330 people.
- attendance of reading rooms - 4.2 thousand people.
- number of hits to the websites of the RSL - 8.2 thousand,
- issuance of documents from the funds of the RSL - 35.3 thousand copies.
- receipt of new documents - 1.8 thousand copies.
49. At the beginning of 2010, 2,140 people worked at the RSL, of which 1,228 were librarians.
50. Women make up about 83% of the total staff of the RSL. The average age of the Library staff is 48.6 years. The average salary is 13,824 rubles.
51. Reading room of the electronic library.
52. Here you can use remote resources and databases to which the RSL is connected - for example, the Cambridge Library, and the bases of the Springer Publishing House - an electronic library of foreign scientific and business journals, the EAST-VIEW database. The subject of the search is publications on the social sciences and the humanities. There is also access to the RSL Electronic Library and dissertations archive.
53. Reading room Internet and electronic documents. Here for 32 rubles per hour you can surf the Internet. There was also some kind of disgusting photo exhibition here. Incomprehensible photographs were hung from the ceiling so that they could not be seen from the covered with plastic sheets.
54. Hall of official documents, here you can read old newspaper files, codes of laws and all kinds of codes. Young people are interested in an extensive collection of UN documents (since 1946) and collections of acts, decisions, decisions of the International Court of Human Rights. GOSTs for "any occasion" are also presented here - there is even one for an "axe-cleaver". Free legal consultations are organized for anyone in the reading room of the OFN.
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58. An old sports magazine, a lot of illustrations were cut out. If we take, for example, the Ogonyok magazine for 1958, we will see Beria's face painted over with ink. This is the work of the censors of the 1st department.
But in addition to the political there was also "popular censorship" - readers observed morality. And the RSL is one of the few libraries of the times of the "Iron Curtain" where all issues of foreign magazines were received. There, of course, there was nothing of the kind, but diligent citizens lengthened their skirts and even glued the pages together so that no one would see examples of bourgeois life. Another distinctive feature of the readers of those years was that they cut out advertisements from magazines.
59. Hall of Rare Books - this is where you can touch the most ancient copies from the RSL fund. "To study the materials of the fund (and only a small part of it - 300 books is exhibited in the museum), to flip through the pages of unique book monuments, can only be read by the reader of the RSL, who has good reasons for this. The fund contains over 100 publications - absolute rarities, about 30 books - the only in the world of copies.Here are a few more examples of museum exhibits that you can work with in this reading room: "Don Quixote" by Cervantas (1616-1617), "Candide or Optimism" by Voltaire (1759), "Moabite Notebook" (1969), Tatar poet Musa Dzhalid, written by him in the fascist prison Maobit, "The Archangel Gospel" (1092). Here are the first copies of the works of Pushkin and Shakespeare, books by the publishers Gutenberg, Fedorov, Badoni, Maurice. From the point of view of the history of Russian books will be interesting - Novikov, Suvorin , Marx, Sytin. Cyrillic books are widely represented."
60. Some of the books have been microfilmed. And, if the presence of the original source is not of paramount importance for the work (paper, ink, etc. is not important, but the content is valuable), it is the microfilm that will be issued in the reading room. The original is out of the question.
62. As it turned out, many book readers steal, and quite often. Particularly inventive cut out a valuable book from the cover, and insert another, close in volume, into it. Often pages are simply torn out or illustrations cut out. And although it is easy to identify a thief or a vandal, it is almost impossible to bring him to justice, for this you need at least 2 witnesses who saw how the book was spoiled.
64. Sometimes cards and documents are forgotten in books. Once in the 80s, a forgotten gold piece was found.
65. Pink Corridor" - one of the exhibition sites of the RSL.
66. Remains of old telephone boxes.
67. Meeting room of the RSL - here the fate of the library is decided - the directorate passes weekly, the course of development is determined, decisions are made.
68. The RSL is the fourth largest library in the world in terms of collections, the British Library is in first place - 150 million items against our 42.
69. From the windows of some reading rooms there are stunning views of the Kremlin.
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72. From the upper floors of the book depository, good views also open up, unfortunately, while I was walking there, the weather turned bad.
Click on the photo to view in large size.
73. Families work in libraries, for example Serezina Olga Viktorovna, she has been working for 41 years, her mother has worked here for 40 years.
74. On the left, Natalya, her daughter, has been working here for 7 years)
75. And this is a policeman, he was extremely indignant that I photographed him, threatened to tear his head off. He urgently needs to be given a referral to the hall of official and regulatory documents so that he can read the laws. Otherwise, he spends all his free time talking on the phone with his wife.
76. Soon there will be a separate story about how books are scanned, restored and repaired.
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The library has two main websites - www.rsl.ru - where you can read about all the services and news - who came where, what exhibitions are held. And www.leninka.ru - the history of the RSL from the moment of its establishment is posted here
All photographs in this report belong tophoto agency "28-300" , for questions about the use of images, as well as photo shoots, write to e-mail [email protected].