About the Reading Room

The European Reading Room should be the starting point for readers and researchers whose interest relates to European countries, including the Russian-speaking areas of Asia, but excluding Spain, Portugal, and the British Isles.

The European Reading Room is staffed by multilingual reference librarians who can direct you to the materials you need and answer reference questions related to the European collections.

The Reference Collection. The European Reading Room contains a reference collection of approximately ten thousand volumes on Europe. This collection covers all European countries except Portugal, Spain, and the British Isles, and includes dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographical, historical, and genealogical works, guides, directories, statistical yearbooks, atlases, and specialized catalogs and guides.

Classics Collection. The reading room also contains the complete or collected works of leading authors from most European countries, e.g., Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from Russia, Goethe and Schiller from Germany, Mickiewicz from Poland, and Shevchenko from Ukraine.

The General Collections. Readers may access the online catalog of the Library of Congress and have books and bound periodicals from the general collections delivered to the European Reading Room.

Periodicals. The European Reading Room has custody of current, unbound Slavic and Baltic periodicals (about 3,500 titles, including 250 newspapers). Also available in the reading room are collections of pamphlets and grey literature.

Manuscripts, Microfilm, and Special Collections

• Collection of Post-Soviet Ephemera
• Old Russian Manuscripts of the Pushkinskii Dom (IRLAN)
• Records from the Central Military Archives in Warsaw
• Records from the Hungarian War History Archives
• Records from the Military Archives of the Romanian Ministry of National Defense

Internet Access, Catalogs, and Finding Aids. The Library's online catalogs can be accessed from the European Reading Room. Readers also have access to the World Wide Web, World News Connection (the public-access, online version of the United States Foreign Broadcast Information Service), OCLC FirstSearch, and various CD-ROM databases relating to Europe.

• The American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (ABSEES) Online
• World News Connection (WNC)
• ISI Emerging Markets

Directories

• European Telephone Directories at the Library of Congress: Indexes and Digitized Versions

Special Services. The area specialists and reference staff of the European Division are prepared to give special assistance to scholars in locating the research materials they need in the Library of Congress.

Address inquiries to: The European Reading Room, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540-4830.