LISNews: Librarian News

Marina Chestnykh oversees an erotica collection assembled by the Communist government that has been a secret for most of the time it\'s been kept. They say such a tight secret that no one knows exactly what is among the approximately 11,000 books, postcards, prints, brochures, drawings and other objects. It\'s on display in the the State Library, formerly the Lenin State LibraryState Library, formerly the Lenin State Library.

\"All these books brought to the Soviet Union could survive only here, in the library,\" said Ms. Ryzhak, who began working in special sections in 1976. \"Anywhere else they would have been burned immediately. We were able to save them, and they are part of our Russian history that we can now have back.\"

Full Story from the NY Times

Someone wrote in about yet another sory on reduction in library services. This one at one of the major research libraries in Australia. The article is from the Sydney Morning Herald.\"The number of users who visited the buildings on Macquarie Street had dropped by 21 per cent in the past three years to a million a year. At the same time, Web access has increased more than 16-fold to 14 million. \"It\'s a shift of the way services are delivered by the library,\" the spokesman said. -- Read More