The director's speech was devoted to the problems of development of the Russian State Library. Special attention was drawn to the plans of founding a new building for the main library of the state and to the prospects of the “National Electronic Library” project. 

 

The speaker analyzed three possible solutions. The first was to construct a new building in the centre of Moscow next to the one now existing. The second variant concerned a new complex in the new Moscow city (the settlement of Kommunarka), while the memorial part of the library complex had to stay in the centre of Moscow, with its reading rooms and the Pashkov House. The last but not least variant was viewed as not to move anywhere and to spend money and efforts on digitization of physical collections of the library.

 

All of the mentioned variants had both their advantages and disadvantages. Meanwhile the third one, apart from purely financial matters,  also had to deal with the 4^th Part of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. The law demands author’s permission before creating a digital copy of their work, performed in writing. As Alexander Ivanovich pointed out, “Last year we almost succeeded in our attempts to digitize works without written permissions of Copyright owners. With the first reading the law was accepted, while with the second one the conditions suddenly changed. We were allowed to digitize works but only those edited no earlier than ten years before and not republished after that.”

 

While answering the reporters’ questions, the director general of the RSL underlined that he viewed himself as an IT–specialist, and thus he wished all the books of the library were available in the electronic form. “If this comes true, it will mean I didn’t work in vain”, he said in conclusion and once again emphasized that there would be no fast solutions for the building problem. All the variants would be well scrutinized and thought over.