December 5, 2023 on the PROCULTURE.RF portal there was held webinar and roundtable “Rare and valuable books – summing up the results of the project of 2023 and planning the events for 2024”. Organized by the RSL “Rare and valuable books” project office, the event was destined to be a logical termination of the fifth year of work under the “Culture” project which had once been initiated to preserve fragile and most important objects of cultural heritage of Russia and to make them accessible for wider circles of users.

The event was given a start by the RSL speakers who presented the statistics on the year of 2023 and provided further consultation concerning the aspects which would traditionally remain hard for participating libraries in their efforts to register rare and valuable editions and contributing annotations for each of the items supplied. Then, the RSL officials had to admit that in spite of the fact the project turned out to be extremely popular and its significance was widely acknowledged, its prolongation beyond the primarily set 2024 was still undecided.

After that the representatives of the National Library of Russia, Library in Natural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as of the Vologda, Smolensk and Nizhny Novgorod regional libraries shared their experience of project work. They described the valuable editions of their own collections, expressed their gratitude to the specialists who helped them to set all the technical matters and reported their eagerness to continue cooperation. Meanwhile there was organized chat communication where everyone could get the answer to their own particular question concerning the thing which remained this or that way unclear, or provide feedback, which was no less important.

The video is available on the YouTube channel of the Russian State Library.

We’d also like to remind you that all the digitized editions can be accessed on the National Electronic Library portal in section “Rare and Valuable Books”.