RUSSIA'S ELECTRONIC LIBRARIES LIVE FROM HAND TO MOUTH, WARNS SCIENTIST

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MOSCOW, April 22 (RIA Novosti) - A majority of Russian-based electronic library projects have no reliable financers and have to do fund-raising wherever they can, Alexander Antopolsky, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences Corresponding Member, writes in the Moscow-based daily, Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

He highlights Maxim Moshkov's popular library, www.lib.ru, as an inspiring instance of low-cost success, with more than 30,000 users a day. Volunteers are steadily sending it digitized books to replenish the project.

Aided by interested companies, the Russian State Library-the country's principal-has established an Electronic Libraries nonprofit partnership to tackle legal and money issues, and coordinate electronic library establishment. The partnership hopes to catch web companies' attention, and attract software, book publishing, computer and telecommunication industrialists. Those are essential targets as universal access to information resources is among civil society's pivotal interests.

The Russian State Library is known as Europe's largest, and the world's second-largest, coming right after the Library of the US Congress. Russian archives, museums, research institutes, universities and all other institutions in possession of information depositories hold tremendous resources.

Russia has for today no less than four hundred universally accessible public, research and educational electronic libraries, and there are several thousand small electronic collections made by organizations or private persons.

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