Russian State Library
The Russian State Library (Russian: Российская государственная библиотека, romanized: Rossiyskaya gosudarstvennaya biblioteka) is one of the three national libraries of Russia, located in Moscow. It is the largest library in the country, largest in Europe and one of the largest in the world. Its holdings crossed over 47 million units in 2017. It is a federal library overseen by the Ministry of Culture, including being under its fiscal jurisdiction.
| Russian State Library | |
|---|---|
| Российская государственная библиотека | |
Main building of the library. The façade still retains the Soviet-era name "Lenin State Library of the USSR" | |
| Location | Moscow, Russia |
| Type | National library |
| Established | 1862 |
| Branches | 3 |
| Collection | |
| Items collected | Books, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings and manuscripts |
| Size | 47.7 million (2020) |
| Criteria for collection | All publications published in Russia, all Russian-language publications published abroad, all foreign-language publications about Russia and other materials |
| Legal deposit | Yes, since 1922 |
| Access and use | |
| Access requirements | Users must be at least 14 years old and present a valid passport or ID card. |
| Circulation | 1.116 million (2019) |
| Members | 387,000 (2019) |
| Other information | |
| Budget | 2.4 billion ₽ (2019) |
| Director | Vadim Duda |
| Employees | 1,699 (2019) |
| Website | www |
Its foundation lay in the opening of the Moscow Public Museum and Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow in 1862. This museum evolved from a number of collections, most notably Count Nikolay Rumyantsev's library and historical collection. It was renamed after Lenin in 1924, popularly known as the Lenin Library or Leninka, and its current name was adopted in 1992.
The library has several buildings of varying architectural styles. In 2012 the library had over 275 km of shelves, including over 17 million books and serial volumes, 13 million magazines, 370 thousand music scores and sound records, 150,000 maps and others. There are items in 247 languages of the world, the foreign part representing about 29 percent of the entire collection. In 2017 holdings covered over 360 languages.