Russia’s Largest Public Library Officially Starting Its Work

“National Electronic Library (NEL), a portal which is in its final stages of development, will provide the citizens of Russia with a free access to the large volume of full-text documents of scientific and educational themes. In 2015, the NEL fund will not only be replenished but we will also begin the formation of the country’s unified library network capable of providing readers with the texts of modern scientific and educational publications,” said the State Secretary, Deputy Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation Grigory Ivliev.

The project was initiated by the National Electronic Library of the Russian State Library and the National Library of Russia more than 10 years ago with another participant of the project – State Public Scientific and Technical Library of Russia. In recent years, the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library as well as some regional libraries joined the project. The Ministry of Culture took the output of the project to a new level, annually including 10% of all titles of scientific and educational themes in Russian into the NEL fund (it already includes more than 1.3 million documents).

The NEL portal will be issuing a single electronic library card for every member, which will enable registration without visiting a particular library featured in the project. This card will give the user the opportunity to get acquainted with the full-text electronic publications, services and facilities of all libraries participating in the project. According to Ivaliev, access to the NEL portal in secondary schools and other educational institutions is crucial for the formation of information literacy.

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