Now in its third year, BibliObraz 2007, under the sponsorship of Russia’s First Lady Ludmila Putina, was the largest and most successful Russian book festival held to date. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington headed the U.S. delegation to BibliObraz, an international book festival aimed at young readers. The event was held Oct. 9-11 in the Manezh, an impressive exhibition hall located near Red Square and the Kremlin.
“The festival was held in a premium venue, in an excellent location, and was the first to be open to the general public,” said Seth de Matties of the Library’s Interpretive Programs Office, who assisted in preparing and mounting the Library’s display at the event. The crowd was estimated at about 10,000 people.
Inspired by the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival, which Mrs. Putina visited in October 2002 as a special guest of the Librarian, BibliObraz was launched in Moscow in October 2003 as a biennial event organized by the Center for the Development of the Russian Language.
In addition to the Librarian and de Matties, the Library was represented by John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book; Harry Leich, Russian area specialist in the European Division; and Vera De Buchananne, of the Open World Program, which brings small delegations of emerging leaders from Eurasia to the United States to see American-style democracy in action and to help forge better understanding between the two nations.
Other members of the U.S. delegation who traveled to Russian to make presentations relating to books for children and young adults were Catherine Gourley, the national coordinator of the Center for the Book’s Letters About Literature reading promotion program, who spoke at a panel on “Reading Promotion in the U.S” chaired by Cole. Amy Stolls, National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), who also participated in the panel and other festival discussions; and four award-winning U.S. authors and illustrators of books for young people, each funded by the NEA.
The authors and illustrators who gave separate presentations were Lynne Rae Perkins, the winner of the 2006 Newbery Prize for her book “Criss Cross;” Jerry Pinkney, winner of multiple Coretta Scott King Awards and Caldecott Medals for his watercolor book illustrations; Sharon Draper, former National Teacher of the Year and winner of multiple Coretta Scott King Awards; and X.J. Kennedy, who received the Poet’s Prize in 2004. Pinkney, Draper and Kennedy have each taken part in the Library’s National Book Festival.
On the first day, Billington gave a featured presentation on the “Library as Information Focal Point” in the “Circle of Reading” conference hall.
Librarian of Congress James Billington and Zhalina Irina Leonidovna, deputy chair of the board of the Center for Russian Language Development, cut the ribbon to open the event in Moscow.
“Libraries remain important as places that people want to visit to see and to conduct research in books and other cultural materials,” said Billington. “But libraries today also play crucial roles as repositories and creators of electronic content, and as knowledge navigators in the information age.”
Delivered in Russian, the Librarian’s speech noted many of the Library’s major initiatives such as plans for the new Library of Congress Experience, the recent opening of the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va., the collaborative digital preservation program and the World Digital Library, which grew out of earlier international digitization efforts.
“The Library launched its first collaborative international digital library project in 1999,” said Billington. “I am pleased to say that this was the Meeting of Frontiers project with Russia … to digitize collections from the United States and Russian to show the parallel experiences [of both countries] in developing their frontiers and the meeting of those frontiers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.”
Billington told the audience of his plans to go directly to Paris after the festival to unveil a prototype for the World Digital Library at the UNESCO General Conference. The Librarian first proposed the project in June 2005 at UNESCO.
That evening the Librarian, Mrs. Billington and Library staff members joined U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns and his spouse Lisa Carty at a grand dinner hosted by Mrs. Putina in St. George’s Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace.
With a the theme of “Cultivating Young Readers, the U.S./Library of Congress exhibit booth featured award-winning U.S. books for young people, Web site presentations of Library of Congress digital projects and a popular display of “pop-up” books produced by U.S. book publishers.
“At the previous two Russian book festivals, the Library of Congress was one of only a few foreign organizations to have an exhibit booth,” said Leich. “This year it was very different. The only exhibition booths were those of foreign countries.”
“We were constantly inundated with visitors,” said De Buchananne. “All of our posters were gone before the first day was over and the last of the BibliObraz brochures in Russian disappeared by noon the next day.”
De Buchananne and Leich made a Web presentation featuring digital projects of interest to Russians and to young adults. They also presented a 40-minute Russian film, “Library of Congress: the Memory Factory,” made in 2004 in cooperation with a Russian film company.
Cole participated in a presentation marking the publication of a bilingual reading promotion handbook titled “Building Nations of Readers: Experiences, Idea, Examples.” (See Information Bulletin, September 2007.) Published in 2006 in English and Russian, the book was edited jointly by Cole and Russian colleague Valeria Stelmakh, and published in cooperation with the British Council and the Pushkin Library Foundation in Russia.
Cole and Gourley represented the U.S. in a special international program. They introduced “Discovering Each Other,” a project developed following BibliObraz 2005 and sponsored by Mrs. Putina.
It called for the publication of classic children’s or young adult books or stories in the languages of each of the participating countries. Selections were made by each country’s first lady. The first volume published in the series comes from Germany and was presented at the festival; it contains contributions from Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. First Lady Laura Bush selected Patricia MacLaughlin’s classic “Sarah, Plain and Tall” as the American contribution.
