The Library Brotherhood

The library brotherhood!

Libraries have been part of most of my career. In my last library role, I headed one of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ research libraries—the Library for Natural Sciences.

In addition to the Library for Natural Sciences, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education oversees six other libraries, including the State Public Scientific and Technological Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPSTL SB RAS). From 2016 to 2022, it was headed by Andrey Guskov.

We often crossed paths at conferences and represented the interests of the library community at both the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Ministry of Culture. Andrey was also an active member of the Academic Council of the Library for Natural Sciences. We ran practically identical institutions, were the same age and had more or less the same educational background, so it was only natural that we became friends.

Andrey left the library sector a year and a half before I did. Since then, he has completed and defended his doctoral dissertation. I have congratulated him on it more than once, but nothing is stopping me from doing so again here on LinkedIn. A month and a half ago, he became Deputy Director General of the Russian Center for Scientific Information (formerly the Russian Foundation for Basic Research), a perfectly logical next step in his career.

Andrey has already moved closer to his new workplace, relocating from Novosibirsk to Moscow. It was a great pleasure to meet him last week. We reminisced about our past projects, exchanged the latest news from the library world and discussed possible areas of collaboration in our current roles.

I am genuinely delighted that Andrey has found the position he truly deserves! Now we will be seeing much more of each other!

P.S. Andrey, it is time you updated your LinkedIn profile 🤓
P.P.S. The photo is from our meeting last Friday.