Open Day at the RSL. Event report

Location: st. Vozdvizhenka, 3/5, Russian State Library
Date: May 25, 2010, 11:00
Upcoming event

On May 25, 2010 the RSL held an Open Day for the 28th time. This year, the emphasis has been placed on the methodological and advisory work of the Library. The RSL specialists talked about trends in scientific and methodological activities and shared their experience in this area. As part of the program there has been held a plenary session and several round tables. The employees of the 21st library unit provided consultations to all interested parties. Educational tours of the most notable parts of the Library (Book Museum, Pashkov House, Computer room for access to the Internet and digital stock , the department of military literature, CRBF and reference and bibliographic service RBS) completed the day.

At the opening ceremony the President of the Russian State Library Viktor Fedorov gave a welcoming speech. He talked about the main activities of the RSL, the current work and also about the difficulties and achievements of the Library.

After a plenary session, during which Maria Akilina, the Head of Library Research and the Science Department, and Galina Raikova, the Head of the Department of library cooperation with libraries in Russia and CIS countries, introduced the audience to the innovations in methodological library activities in general and to the experience of the RSL in particular. After the announcements by a leading specialist in the information work of cultural and educational programs 'Rodnoe Slovo' Sergei Poteriaiko ('The role of dictionaries in the information environment of the XXI century') and chief editor of 'Svet' magazine German Smirnov ('Magazine "Svet" — ecological journal for home reading'), the guests were invited to the Library to view the existing exhibitions: 'The 65 years of the Great Victory', 'Library during the war' and 'The winning editions of the All-Russian competition of scientific works on library science, bibliography and bibliology for 2009—2010'.

The work of the reference and bibliographic service attracted great interest.: how much time a bibliographer can spare to help one reader? how to plan the work properly so that there is enough time to advise everyone? What number of sources to provide in response to a query? These and other questions were directed at our staff by the guests from various libraries at the round table 'Reference and bibliographic services of the RSL'. The unique 'Virtual Reference Service' of the Library was explained in great detail. The request can be sent to a specialist at any time from anywhere in the world and it will be processed over 2 days. Restrictions on the number of requests do not exist.

From 13:00 to 14:30 the personnel from various departments hosted guests — colleagues from other libraries. Thus, in the cataloguing department, we caught up with a leading researcher of the Central Scientific Agricultural Library Elena Klimova, who came to the Open Day of the RSL for the first time. She wanted to know how a workplace for the digester is arranged. 'During the consultation I realized that it worked very differently from the way we do things. In fact, we perform the same functions, but the technical implementation occurs on different platforms, using different programming methods, and of course, there are many differences'. Elena Vladimirovna shared her own work experience which was very interesting to the RSL staff: 'This is a wonderful day, which allowed us to find out about the work of the other libraries'.

Consultations at the Department of Official and Standardized publications are favoured mostly by students. Young people are interested in an extensive collection of the UN (since 1946) documents and collections of acts, regulations and resolutions of the international Court of Human Rights. There are also AUSS for 'every occasion in life'. In a reference room of DOS there is free legal advice for anyone who needs it .

The tour to the computer room for access to the Internet and digital stock started at exactly 15:00. Consultant Evgenia Smirnova explained that for many years the 'Reference room of Internet and Digital documents' was the main place among the libraries of the Ministry of Culture Collections network to access the largest collection of remote documents acquired by the Library. This collection (the fund of network licensed resources) is universal in content, diverse in types of publications, is impressive in it’s volume (about 50 thousand books, 23 thousand journals, including the 3 thousand domestic ones) is valuable because it represents credible journals of the science world, with a high impact factor. The Internet room provides publications on optical compact discs, their current fund has 7 thousand kinds of multimedia publications on various subjects, and a destination search of which should be carried out in a special section of the RSL catalogue. The largest number of questions from visiting librarians were directed at the problems of providing users with open and licensed resources, which have been purchased by the Library, especially in terms of constraints imposed by Part 4 of the Civil Code of RF, as well as problems of any payment for services.

That’s how it was — the Open Day of the largest library in the country. We hope that this event, which was taking place on the eve of the All-Russian Day of the Libraries, was helpful for our colleagues and interesting to our readers.