On 29 May, 12th meeting of the German-Russian library dialogue took place in Kaliningrad. The Head of the Rare Book Section of VSU library, Galina Lantsuzskaya, participated in the event.
The main venue for the event was the Friedland Gates Museum and the topiс for the discussion was "Cultural Heritage and New Technologies".
The German-Russian library dialogue was established in 2009 under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Cultural Earth Foundation, and Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Germany). It is an informal union of Russian and German libraries aimed at restoring historic book collections, which were illegally taken during the Great Patriotic War. VSU library which lost a significant part of its book collections also has books that were taken during the war and is a permanent participant of the international dialogue.
According to the welcome letter of the President of the Russian Library Association, Mikhail Afanasiev, the result of such meetings is knowledge sharing and practical results, i.e. restoration and preservation of book collections of historic and scientific significance for the European culture as a whole.
The meeting in Kaliningrad gathered representatives from the largest libraries and museums from Russia and Germany. One of its most important events was to the return of seven valuable books of 18th–19th century to Novgorod State Museum.
The General Director of the Rudomino National State Foreign Literature Library, co-chairperson of the forum, Vadim Duda, thanked the German colleagues for preserving the unique books and bringing them back to Russia.
Galina Lantsuzskaya told the participants of the meeting about the books from the Wallenrodt collection which are stored in the library of Voronezh State University. The library conducts consistent work aimed at identifying books lost by the library during the war and identifying the origin of books that were received by the library to replenish its collections. For example, a few books of the eleventh volume of the "Joint Catalogue of Cultural Values Stolen or Lost During the Second World War" are fully dedicated to the library of Voronezh State University. At the same time, the library has an electronic database of books that were restituted by Germany.
Today, the database has 4,275 entries. The library has other books from Königsberg collections, including 45 books from the Wallenrodt library, the Königsberg book collection of the 17th–20th century. The library was named after its founder, the Prussian chancellor Martin von Wallenrodt (1570–1632), and is of considerable scientific and cultural value.
During the meeting, the participants discussed the importance of digital library resources and the application of modern digital technologies in the restoration and preservation of book collections.
