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European Reading Room staff help users navigate the Library’s vast European collections. The Division’s specialists promote discoverability by providing reference materials, guides, bibliographies, and other studies. Staff recommends new collection materials to best serve researchers, the library community, and federal agencies. The European Reading Room is located on the second floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, in the Southeast Pavilion, entry is via the Hispanic Reading Room. A reader card is required for access to all reading rooms.
The European Reading Room should be the starting point for readers and researchers whose interest relates to European countries, including the Russian-speaking areas of Asia, but excluding Spain, Portugal, and the British Isles.
Our staff of multilingual reference librarians can direct you to the materials you need and answer reference questions related to the European collections.
The European Reading Room offers research orientations every other Tuesday. Consultations also are available by appointment or for walk-ins. The European Division also sponsors special events such as lectures and symposia.
The European Reading Room contains a reference collection of approximately ten thousand volumes on Europe. This collection covers all European countries except Portugal, Spain, and the British Isles, and includes dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographical, historical, and genealogical works, guides, directories, statistical yearbooks, atlases, and specialized catalogs and guides.
Readers may access the catalog of the Library of Congress and have books and bound periodicals from the general collections delivered to the European Reading Room.
The European Reading Room has custody of current, unbound Slavic and Baltic periodicals (about 3,500 titles, including 250 newspapers). Also available are collections of political and social ephemera and uncataloged pamphlets.
This guide is for students of French language and culture. It offers a selection of books in French including: comics (bande dessinée) & graphic novels, children's and young adult literature, crime novels, contemporary fiction, and contemporary issues.
Election ephemera such as party platforms, posters, and flyers are primary sources for the study of politics, history and elections. This guide describes the collection for the March 2008 Russian Presidential election in the European Reading Room.
On April 26, 1986, a safety test at a power plant near the town of Chornobyl escalated into the worst nuclear accident in history. This guide provides information about print and electronic resources relevant to the event.
This guide is a starting point for research on women in the French Revolution of 1789. It includes English and French-language bibliographies, open-access digital resources, images, and biographical information on key figures in the Revolution.
This guide to Bulgarian statistical publications covers major sources for demography, agriculture, public finance, and general statistics. The selection is based mostly on the collections of the Library of Congress, but other sources are also included.
This guide to Croatian newspapers in the Library of Congress includes titles published within the current territory of Croatia, regardless of language, as well as Croatian-language titles published in the Balkan and world diasporas.
