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!