Library of Congress: Expansion of "Meeting of Frontiers" Web site

[Laura Gottesman]

The Library of Congress has completed a major expansion of the "Meeting of Frontiers" Web site http://frontiers.loc.gov, the seventh since the site was first launched in December 1999. 

"Meeting of Frontiers" is a bilingual, English-Russian collaborative project that chronicles the parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in exploring, developing and settling their frontiers, and the meeting of those frontiers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. It features rare books, maps, manuscripts, photographs, sheet music and other materials from libraries in the United States and Russia, and is widely used in schools and libraries throughout the United States and Russia. 

The latest expansion includes 24 collections from 14 different libraries and archives in Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Krasnoiarsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and other Siberian cities, as well as additional collections from the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, the Russian State Library in Moscow, and the Library of Congress. Digitization of materials in Siberia was undertaken by a mobile scanning team based in Novosibirsk that worked in cooperation with the Library of Congress to identify rare materials of special interest to American and Russian scholars, teachers, and students.

Among the items included in the latest expansion are photographs of the indigenous peoples of eastern Siberia taken by scientific expeditions to remote regions of Siberia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries;  photographs depicting the life of the Russian émigré community in Harbin, China in the 1920s -1940s; albums and photograph collections relating to icebreaking on Lake Baikal and to fire-fighting in Irkutsk; manuscripts and photographs that document the persecution of Russian Old Believer religious communities under the communist authorities; sketches, drawings, and watercolors of the Siberian landscape by several local artists; and documents and photographs relating to the Cheliuskin, a Soviet scientific research vessel that sank in February 1934 while attempting to sail the Northern Sea route from Murmansk to Vladivostok.

With the most recent additions, the "Meeting of Frontiers"  Web site includes more than 580,000 digital images relating to the history of Siberia, Alaska, and the American West.

"Meeting of Frontiers" is funded by Congressional appropriations in the Library's FY 1999 and FY 2004 budgets. Additional support for development of the project in Russia has been provided by the Open Society Institute of Russia. 

This online presentation joins other collections from around the world available through the Global Gateway Web site. These collections can be seen at http://www.loc.gov/international. In the "Collaborative Digital Libraries" section are materials from Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia and Spain. The "Digital Collections" section provides links to thematic presentations, including "Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age," "The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures" and the extraordinary "Prokudin-Gorskii Collection" of photographs of Russia taken just before the revolution.

Please direct any questions regarding this collection to the Global Gateway inquiry form: http://www.loc.gov/help/contact-international.html.