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
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.
Directories
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.
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