The National Library of Belarus
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| The National Library of Belarus Национальная библиотека Беларуси |
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| Established | September 15, 1922 |
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| Location | Minsk |
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| Size | 8,600,000 |
| Other information | |
| Director | Roman Motulski |
| Website | www.nlb.by/ |
The National Library of Belarus (Belarusian: Нацыянальная бібліятэка Беларусі, Russian: Национальная библиотека Беларуси), founded on September 15, 1922, is a copyright library of the Republic of Belarus. It houses the largest collection of the Belarusian print and the third largest collection of books in Russian behind the Russian State Library (Moscow) and the Russian National Library (St. Petersburg).
It is now located in a new 72-metre (236 feet) high building in Minsk, Belarus. The building has 22 floors and was completed in January 2006. The building can seat about 2,000 readers and features a 500-seat conference hall. Its main architectural component has the shape of a rhombicuboctahedron. The library's new building was opened on June 16, 2006.
The National Library of Belarus is the main information and cultural centre of the country. Its depository collections include 8 million items of different kinds of media.
In 1993 the National Library of Belarus started to create its own electronic information resources. It has generated a collection of bibliographic, factual graphic, full-text, graphic, sound and language databases that comprise more than 2 million records. The repertoire of databases is quite wide: humanities, social sciences, history, art and culture of Belarus. The library users also have access to databases of other libraries and academic institutions, including foreign ones.
The library service is in great demand. More than 90 thousand citizens of Belarus are library users, who annually request 3.5 million documents. Every day the library is visited by more than 2.2 thousand people. The library daily delivers about 12 thousand documents from its funds.
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Coordinates: 53°55′53″N 27°38′45″E / 53.93139°N 27.64583°E
