Libraries of Russia: “To the heroic people of the Soviet Union” project

The National library of the Udmurt Republic joined the project “To the heroic people of the Soviet Union: unified catalogue of books, supplied by the United Kingdom and the USA to replenish holdings of regional, republican, and krai libraries”, which was initiated by the V.G. Belinsky Sverdlovsk Regional Scientific Library.

To date the project has brought together five libraries (Yekaterinburg, Izhevsk, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don, and Tomsk). Librarians of the National library of the Udmurt Republic have discovered ten books originated from the UK and the USA, which replenished the library’s holdings in 1940’s and this list is expected to be growing.

It is a little known fact that during the Great Patriotic War USSR libraries received books, which were presented to the Soviet people by the Allies. A distinctive feature of many of those books are bookplates, labels, stamps, notes and marks made at libraries or by books’ owners. To complete the project’s database librarians are looking for these very attributes, and are preparing the scans of all the images, found in the books together with the books’ bibliographic information.