Meetings in Moscow!
Greetings from Moscow! I and others had the opportunity to meet with colleagues from Moscow State University for Culture and Arts and Russian State University for the Humanities Library. In the latter meeting, Eduard Sukiasyan, the main editor for “BBK” from the Russian State Library [Library of Congress' counterpart], responded to our question about the kind of IT challenges Russian libraries face.
Eduard chose to talk about the Russian school libraries. He said there were over 46,000 school libraries in Russia and most of them do not have any access to the Internet. They may have some PCs but not Internet access. He and others saw this is a major challenge. He said that they were working on this, but it was going very slow. Our delegation was very surprised. I realize that there may be school libraries in the U.S. that may fall into that category but not to the extent as here in Russia.
As I reflected at the end of the day here in Russia, I thought about the progress we are hoping to make here in the U.S. by working hard on the Skills Act [co-sponsored by Rep. Raul Grijalva [Az] – an ardent library and Reforma supporter] to have a qualified school librarian in every school library in our respective school districts as part of the No Child Left Behind reauthorization bill. We have got to turn our situation around to put all our effort into getting that act in and the bill passed! As chair of the ALA Committee on Legislation and as your next ALA president, I will continue to work hard on this effort and other efforts to improve the quality of library services to our school children by getting qualified personnel back into those libraries.
On another note, Eduard also commented on President Putin’s support of libraries in Russia. In fact, Putin announced several months ago that he was establishing a presidential library which would be a virtual library concentrating on government, law, and history. There would be branches of this library throughout Russia. (Our delegation didn’t know the context of “branches” if this library was going to be completely electronic…) Nonetheless, our Russian colleagues were excited about this visible support from their president.
This trip has been very rewarding…. we have already found a way we can collaborate with our colleagues from Russian State University. More later…… it has been a long but exciting day!
CAMILA
Tags: digital divide, legislation, russia, school libraries
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.