Международная научно-практическая конференция "Инвестиции в библиотечном деле: опыт, проблемы, перспективы"
(17-19 октября 2006 года, Санкт-Петербург)

Experience of fruitful library cooperation on political basis

Idea and start

First shortly about the normal budget of the National Library of Finland: main part of the budget comes from the state through the Ministry of Education that is about 80 % , the rest comes from the University of Helsinki.

The Paris club is a unofficial group with the purpose to find stable solutions for countries having financial difficulties.  In 1994 the Paris club gave to its member state Finland right to settle the former Soviet Union debt with Russia partially by conversion.
The debt was a result of the so called clearing-house trade from the 1950s to the 1980s.   When Soviet Union collapsed the situation was unbalanced so that there was a debt of approximately 600 million euros to Finland.  Russia took the responsibility for the debt.
The governmental bodies, the ministries of finance or trade and industry of our countries started their negotiations.

We heard about all this in our radio and read in the newspapers.

We also learned that our army was going to make acquisitions using this possibility.  Since we believe far more in peaceful coexistence, we in the Slavonic library started thinking “why not books”.  “Why not books” and more knowledge of our neighbour?

So it all started: the first letter to the Ministry of Education was sent late in 1995  by the vice-rector of the University.  He happened to be professor of Slavonic languages, especially Russian.

The first application contained only books and bibliographical records.
And it was so exceptional that even the news,  both  TV and radio came to interview us, some newspapers as well.  The other applications were more of technical character, ours was the only of humanistic profile.

But our dear partners in Moscow said  “this is really difficult, really difficult”.
And there was a silence of nearly five years before we started at the turn of the new millennium.

By that time our list had changed a little: The first item of conversion for us was the on line-service Integrum.  It is still in use in several Finnish universities by debt conversion. 

Then there were the ideas of getting microfilms of materials that we never received within the legal deposit copy privilege.  The list itself was basically created some years before we knew anything of the the  debt conversion just to know what was missing.  So we were very happy that  there was such a tool to be used in a short time to start the work.  Some missing reference works were added as well as some newspapers from Karelia, which actually belong to the national Fennica-collection.

Third  part of our desiderata was a small amount of newspapers  to be digitized.  They were in Russian, Arabic Tatar and Yiddish.

The last part consisted of books printed in 1990s from different parts of Russia, but not from Moscow or St. Petersburg plus a set of new maps.
All these were either lists of lacking issues in our collections or something that our readers-researchers wanted to have, or ideas presented by the former chief librarian, professor Esko Häkli.

All the time we were also interested of copying bibliographical records, but it did not seem to be possible.

In the proposals we should have compared the price of the project with equivalents with some western possible partners.  In our case this was sort of nonsense, since no western library  could have provided us with the material.   Of course it was possible to count prices of microfilming or digitizing for instance according to our own prices.  

Basics of cooperation

In the proposals which we presented to the Moscow negotiating partner, Machinoexport, we had to name a Russian partner supplier for each project.
Microfilms and digitization we planned in the way that the Russian partner should have had  the same legal deposit copy right as we and the cooperation should benefit both us and the supplying partner.
We were not very aware of the equipment or processes in the National Library of Russia, but  we had a strong belief that our colleagues would be interested in our proposal.

Bodies acting in the conversion process

The whole process has been a work of many different bodies, which act in two countries and some of them have actually very little or no connection at all to libraries.

We started the work with a letter to the vice-rector of our University.  Of course there had been some discussions about the idea before with the chief librarian and some persons in the library committee of all the libraries within the University.
From the rectorate the idea proceeded to the Ministry of Education, from there to the Ministry of Trade and Industry and they negotiated with the Russian partner, Machinoexport (later Machinoimport).  During the five years of waiting I discussed a couple of times with the representative of Machinoexport by telephone.

Our suppliers in the process have been Integrum-Techno and the National Library of Russia.

We never saw any money.  All the extremely huge sums were only figures on the paper.
With the payments acted  two bodies, Finnish Finnvera and Russian Vneshcombank.  For Finnvera I checked all the bills received from the Russian bank.  But when we received  microfilms, I also discussed with our customs and wrote applications to avoid enormous taxes.

Our basic consultants were the Machinoexport representatives in Moscow and later also in Helsinki, at the Trade Representation of the Russian Federation in Finland and some persons in our Ministry of Trade and Industry.

Colleagues in the Slavonic Library were enthusiastically in the process and everything was clear for them, but sometimes we noticed that administrative figures had difficulties to understand the whole process – the slow maturing of the projects, from almost 5 to 3 years each, the bonuses for the Russian negotiating bodies etc.

Results, experiences

The results of the project are both concrete and intellectual and mental.  As the concrete result we  can serve now more complete sets of old journals and newspapers, books and reference works.  New books and maps as well as digitized materials give more attraction to the collection. 
We are pleased with the quality of the work done. We have heard some  suspects concerning the quality of microfilms, but we have been proud to say the quality is good and our specialists support us.  And the best of all – our readers have been  really happy with the materials.
In the picture you can see the materials we have received and which materials have already served the research.

On the other hand: we wanted to be more in contact with our Russian colleagues and this made it possible in a very special and natural way.  One of the specialists of our National Library became a true friend of Russian life and wanted to start studies of the language.
The flexibility of our Russian colleagues was amazing, they had the courage to commit to this huge work and they have been willing to replace  if we notice defective films.  Integrum-Techno has also listened to our suggestions to make their product more attractive.

We also learned of ourselves:  we can do some special things if we first invent them.  The project has given self-confidence to everybody in the Slavonic Library.  The group is smart enough to work hard, to gain the results, to hand them over to researchers and enjoy the achievements.  We named our team Pasha Angelina –team!

What will be our next common enterprise?  Could it be somehow the “Internet research environment” that we plan at the moment to celebrate the beginning of the period of autonomy of Finland in 1809?  Could it actually be a common project with Swedish, Russian and Finnish partners?

Report of inspection

A report is written already about the debt conversion though the last millions are not even divided yet.  It is done by an auditor from the Public National Economy Department.  All the projects financed by the conversion are mentioned there and in several places is stated also that these projects would not have been possible to carry out with normal budgets.