Lenin Library Collection

The strength of the Lenin library's collection, appears to be the fact that is has the most complete collection of Russian newspapers and periodicals in the world and the largest collection of foreign books and journals in the USSR (The free dictionary 2010).  During the 1800's, a collection of foreign-language publications was gathered by what is now known as the National Library of Russia, to be used as justification for a plan to take over land on Russia's borders (Lerner 1998).

 Its manuscript collections contain manuscripts dating back to the sixth century. Collections includes, including a collection of of old Russian manuscript books, beginning with the Arkhangel’skii Gospel (1092), as well as manuscripts of writers, scholars, and public figures (The free dictionary 2010). Other collections include manuscripts and item in several different early forms of script.  The Russian State Library website has what is called its Central Main Collection, described on the website as being periodical publications in 192 languages of the world in all spheres of knowledge (Russian state library 2010). The collection is comprised of Russian material published after 1825, and non-Russian published material, published after 1700.  This Central Collection also contains approximately 200 personal libraries and collections of Russian historians, scientists, writers and artists.  Other collections at the library include maps, lithographs,dissertations, newspapers, musical scores and records and periodicals.  More unusual collection include ones on military literature, an oriental collection, a collection of Russian literature abroad which is a collection of works by writers' who were born in Russian but whose work was published overseas and overseas published work by other countries about Russia.  Another collection, possibly of particular interest for library studies' students is a Collection of literature on library science, bibliography and bibliology.


References:

1. Pilch, JT 2004, 'Russian state library', Russian history encyclopaedia, Answers.com, viewed 29 September 2010.

2. Zemina, E 2010, 'The Russian state library (RSL)', The European library, viewed 29 September 2010.

3. Russian State Library 2010, 'Collections', Russian state library, viewed 29 September 2010.

4. Klevenskii MM & Silversvan EN, 1979, 'Lenin state library of the USSR', The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, The Gale Group, The Free Encyclopedia, viewed 3 October 2010.

5. Lerner, FA 1998, The story of libraries: from the invention of writing to the computer age, Continuum, New York.

**4 - 3rd edition - not sure if cited correctly.**
For this stage of my research, I again completed a Google search to find information about the collections the Lenin library has.  This I found to be a little difficult, not knowing whether to search under 'Russian State Library', or it's former name, 'Lenin Library', which is what many people still refer to it as.  In the end I did both, which made searching a bit time-consuming.  Again, as with the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, some of the search results were in Russian, which made it a little difficult to know whether they were relevant.