The collection is maintained by the Slavic & East European Library.
The Slavic & Eastern European collection supports instruction and research in Russian, Soviet, and East European studies, with particular emphasis on social science and humanities disciplines. In addition to serving a large number of local users, the collection serves a large number and variety of off-campus users, including faculty and students from other educational institutions, government agencies, and private corporations. The primary focus of the Slavic & East European Library’s collection development and acquisitions efforts is on publications from Russia and Eastern Europe in the vernacular languages of these areas. The Slavic collection is the largest in Illinois and the Midwest, and at any state-supported U.S. university. The collection is important not only because of its size, but also for programs (such as the Slavic Reference Service and the Summer Research Laboratory) that provide access to its collections to researchers worldwide. The collection consists of 568,000 volumes.
Revised April 2005