Professional holidays: All-Russian Libraries’ Day

On May 27 Russia is celebrating the All-Russian Libraries’ Day. This holiday was declared by a Decree of the President of the Russian Federation Boris N. Yeltsin of July 27 1995 and timed to the foundation anniversary of the first state public library – the Imperial Public Library (today the National Library of Russia) in 1795.

Today there are over 150,000 libraries in Russia, which employ thousands of qualified librarians. Federal libraries of Russia, located in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and a number of libraries of the Russian Federation subjects represent world’s information giants and comprise multimillion collections of books. Whereas both national libraries of Russia – the Russian State Library in Moscow and the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg are in the list of top five major libraries of the world.

The All-Russian Libraries’ Day is not only a professional holiday of librarians, bibliographers, scholars, pedagogues, who dedicated their lives to preservation and development of book culture in Russia; this is the holiday of the whole nation, the holiday for those, who loves a book.