On March 19–23, the All-Russian scientific-and-practical conference "Library collections in the digital era: traditional and electronic resources, acquisition and use” with the participation of a representative of the National Library of Belarus was held.
The conference in Saint-Petersburg was arranged by the Russian Library Association, the Russian National Library and the scientific and technical centre “Informregistr” (Moscow). The conference sponsors: the publishing house “Universitetskaja KNIGA” (Moscow), the ELSEVIER Publishing House (Holland) and the Information Agency Swets Information Services.
The conference gathered library acquisition specialists, bibliographers, information specialists, heads of libraries and publishing houses, and also representatives of aggregators of information product. The National Library of Belarus was represented by Head of section of the Information service division E.V. Tulupova with the report “Electronic resources as a means to accomplish requests of users of the National Library of Belarus”.
Participants of the conference considered the questions of the development of the electronic resources market in Russia and the issues of acquisition and use of electronic resources in libraries. Also, within the framework of the conference, there was a working meeting of participants of the international project “The virtual reference service of the Corporation of Universal Scientific Libraries” in which the National Library of Belarus has been participating since 2008. During the working group meeting the results of the five-year work were summarized, methodological and technological aspects of accomplishment of users’ requests were considered, and suggestions concerning the optimization of the Virtual service were made.
