Present & Future

Like the State Library in Victoria, both libraries run a range of different events showcasing the unique and interesting items in their collections.  Up and running right now at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France are four exhibitions, one of which is a permanent exhibition.  'France14' is based on a book featuring fourteen young French photgraphers, 'The Villemot Collection' is a collection on the works of French artist Bernard Villemot and 'Raymond Depardon: A Personal Vision of France' an intersting exhibition on photographs throughout different areas of France.  The permanent exhhibition, 'The Globes of Louis XIV', is "tthe incredible story of the spheres made for King Louis XIV (viewed 5th October, website below).

The Bibliotheque Nationale de France also has a website for what they call Virtual Exhibitions, which are online exhibitions.  These cover books, literature, photographs, art and architecture.

One of the books featured in an online exhibit

The Russian State Library (Lenin library) currently lists three current events/exhibitions on the English version of it's website, and although it does mention that they hold regular cultural and events such as book presentations, readers' conferences, public talks and concerts with scholars, writers, artists and actors, in the interests of promoting reading to the public (Russian State library, 2010). At present, these are the Ninth Annual Scientific Conference "The Digital Age of Culture", a meeting of the heads of information services for culture and arts, foucsing on "information support of regional cultural policy" (Russian State library, 2010), and lastly, an international scientific conference, title "Bibliophilia and private collections".  None of the events appear to be open to the general public however, and seem to be more industry-related conferences.

 Of the past exhibitions held at the library, only one is mentioned on the website, the "Day of Orthodox books in the RSL".  This was a one day exhibition, for the day of the same name, and showcased several rare religious books.

One of the rare book from the Day of Orthodox books at the RSL event, image courtesy of the Russian State Library webiste

References:

1. Bibliotheque Nationale de France 2010, 'National library of France', Bibliotheque Nationale de France,viewed 6 October 2010.

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

For this post, I mainly relied again on internet searches using Google.  I have mostly stuck to using only a couple of sources as these were the best sources of the type of information I was wanting.  I still found the language issue to be a problem however.  I also used Swinburne library this week to search for articles on their databases which might be of use.  I did find quite a few results for the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and I am considering a couple of these for use.  On the Lenin library, I did not find quite so many results, and some of these appeared to come from encyclopaedias, of which I already have sufficient, somewhat similar information.  For the Bibliotheque Nationale, although there were several hundred results, most of them did not appear to be useful for my purposes.