Digital Collections from Russia
In November and December 1999 the Library of Congress concluded agreements with the Russian State Library and the National Library of Russia regarding their participation in the Meeting of Frontiers project. In May 2000, joint Library of Congress-Russian teams completed the installation of high-resolution scanning equipment, on long-term loan from the Library of Congress, at both institutions.
In April 2001, the Library of Congress and the Open Society Institute of Russia concluded an agreement to establish a cooperative regional scanning center in Novosibirsk to digitize selected collections from libraries and archives in Siberia and the Russian Far East. Under contract to the Library of Congress, the Open Society Institute funded and administered a series of four grant competitions―for Western Siberia, Central Siberia, the Russian Far East, and a catch-all competition open to all institutions that might have missed the original call for their respective region―through which institutions could nominate collections in their holdings for digitization and inclusion in the Meeting of Frontiers website. Equipment was delivered to Novosibirsk in May 2001 and scanning at regional libraries and archives began shortly thereafter.
Over the life of the cooperative arrangement between the Open Society Institute and the Library of Congress, collections were digitized at 33 libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies in twenty cities in Siberia and the Russian Far East: Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky (Sakhalin Island), Barnaul, Berdsk, Birobidzhan, Blagoveshchensk, Igarka, Kemerovo, Kolyma, Krasnoyarsk, Kyakhta (Buriat Republic), Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, Noril'sk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Tobolsk, Tomsk, Ulan-Ude, Vladivostok, and Yakutsk.
These digital collections are presented here in their entirety.