1. Digital Libraries Initiatives in Belarus Liudmila Kiriukhina, Deputy Director of the National Library of Belarus; email: kiryukhina@nacbibl.org.by Piotr Lapo, Director of the Belarusian State University Library, President of the Belarusian Library Association email: lapo@bsu.by

3. Territory207,000 km 2 Population9,990,400 70% of population are urban Belarus is divided into six regions Belarusian and Russian are official state languages Minsk - the capital of Belarus The distance from Minsk to Warsaw is 500 km, to Moscow - 700 km, to Berlin - 1060 km, to Vienna - 1300 km. Republic of Belarus

4. Belarusian Libraries The National Library of Belarus 7 Republican research libraries 6 Oblast (regional) libraries 4,725 Public libraries 4,362 Academic libraries 450 Special libraries of industrial enterprises 170 Medical libraries 100 Agricultural libraries 26 Libraries of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus 12 Sport libraries

5. Belarusian Libraries 11,5 thousand libraries 250 mln. documents 6 mln. readers 180 mln. documents provided for readers annually

6. The National Library of Belarus Founded in 1922 About 8,000,000 items of keeping in 50 languages 3,000,000 documents provided for readers annually 500,000 national documents and Belarusica 90,000 rare and manuscripts 400,000 items of special collections (notes, audiomaterials, maps, images) Staff – 560 people 180 personal computers united by LAN above 1,000,000 records in OPAC

8. NLB New Building Stocks for 14,000,000 items 2,000 readers’ places Conference-hall (500 places) Staff – 1,000 people

9. NLB DL Projects International Projects – Under the aegis of UNESCO DL of manuscripts (200 documents) DL of the Belarusian heraldry (1,000 images) DL “Radzivilliana” (Memory of Belarus) – Thanks to support of the USA Embassy in Belarus DL “Music heritage of Belarus” (10,000 gramophone records and tapes)

11. Other DL Projects International – VirLib – Open Archives Initiative Local – Portal of the Republican Scientific Medical Library (http://www.med.by/) – DL of the Belarusian State Medical University Library

13. Virlib Project Participants: – The Higher Technical School in Osnabruck (Germany) – The Belarusian State University – The Belarusian State Economic University – The Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics

14. Electronic Belarus (2003-2005) Has Status of a National State Program Goals: – Development of the republican telecommunications network – Creation of the National Center of Digitalization (special collections, rare books, national prints, etc.) – Development of the National corporate system of electronic documents delivery