This week, I started my search, with a trip to the library at the Prahran campus of Swinburne University, where I spoke to the staff member on the Research desk about what I was looking for. This turned out to be mostly fairly unhelpful, as she explained she was not the best person to ask as she was new, and could I come back during the day. After explaining why I couldn't, she did try and help me by trying to find a subject guide for the library studies course on the Swinburne website and then in Google (nothing on the Swinburne website but found something through Google, at VUT). In the end, I asked her to look up a book which I thought Swinburne might have on the shelves, and from this we found a few other titles, and she suggested I have a look around in the area where the book I wanted was, as the other titles had similar call numbers. In the end, this is what I did after I found the book I wanted, and I managed to find a few other interesting books that might help my research on the shelves, as well as the ones she had helped me find on the catalogue. From here, I decided that the next step should now be to try a basic Google search for information on the Lenin library and it's history.
Now, onto my findings. The Lenin library is the State Library of Russia, and is located in Russia. The library is quite young compared to several of the other well-known libraries, being founded in 1862. It is Russia's first free public library, and was originally called the The Library of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumiantsev Museum, or The Rumiantsev Library. The name of the library comes from count Nikolai Petrovich Rumyantsev, whose art collection was held by the public library housed at the same complex as the library. Along with the art collection, a collection of books and manuscripts were also donated, and these are what formed the library. When the collection expanded after the October Revolution, and in 1925 it was decided that the complex holding the museum and library would be dissolved, and the collection spread out over various sites. The library's was also renamed the V. I. Lenin State Library of the USSR, and the collection was housed at premises know as the Old Building of the Russian State Library, with construction of new buildings for the library started in 1930. In 1992, the library was again renamed to what it is now known as, being the Russian State Library.
It's difficult to find good pictures of the Lenin library, this one is courtesy of http://www.richard-seaman.com/Travel/Russia/Moscow/Highlights/index.html
The research for these two libraries has been interesting. I found it interesting that so much of both these libraries collections come from royalty or rulers, of whom today society generally does not seem to have a lot of use for or interest in (at least not in Australia), and also that a lot of both collections were obtained during times of political events. If things had of turned out differently, one consequence may have been that I might not now be writing as much about these two libraries, and maybe instead about collections owned by particular people!I have realised from my search today that perhaps I should have started my search at the Swinburne library, more to rule it out as a source of information, and also due to the fact that as an online student who does not live all that close to Swinburne's campuses, actually physically getting there is time consuming. So, my advice would be to start with this first. Although you can access the catalogue from home, I found it much better to actually come into the library itself. For me connectivity to the library's catalogue and resources like the online databases is much better, and you can browse the shelves like I did, which I found useful.
References
'Russian state library' 2010, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, viewed 4 September 2010.
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