Happy Birthday, NLR!

27 May is not only St Petersburg’s City Day.

27 May 1795 marks the birth of the National Library of Russia: on that day, Empress Catherine II approved by imperial decree the plans to construct the Imperial Public Library building.

On 27 May 1995, President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin issued a decree stipulating: “Establish an All-Russian Day of Libraries, to be celebrated on 27 May, aligning the date with the 1795 founding of Russia’s first state public library – the Imperial Public Library, now the National Library of Russia.”

In September 2016, I attended the 11th annual international IGeLU conference in Trondheim, Norway, where I presented St Petersburg and the National Library of Russia as the hosts of IGeLU 2017.

We created a truly beautiful video for that presentation. It is fairly long because it consists of three parts:

• A presentation of St Petersburg;
• A presentation of the National Library of Russia’s main building at the intersection of Nevsky Prospect and Sadovaya Street;
• A presentation of the National Library of Russia’s new building on Moskovsky Prospect.

I strongly recommend watching the entire video – with the sound on, of course.

Enjoy!

Happy birthday, St Petersburg!

Happy birthday, NLR!