Submitted by
Paul L. Horecky, Chief
July 21, 1975

I. ACQUISITIONS

What is the best test of the effectiveness of an acquisitions program? One might safely say the ability to meet reader requests fully and satisfactorily. A backward glance over the reference and bibliographic activities of the Division during FY 1975 shows that the Library's resources in this Division's area of responsibility met the test in the overwhelming majority of cases.

In an area division such as ours the selection process is complicated. In addition to the usual factors of cost and assessment of the probable needs of the users, we deal with eighteen countries, more than twenty languages, and a considerable portion of the world's publications. Of the 561,000 titles which UNESCO estimated as the total world production in 1972, 190,000 titles or slightly more than one-third were issued in the area of our geographic assignment. The high level of economic and cultural development of these lands and their importance in world affairs impose further tasks of assuring a well-selected coverage of the literature.

Without special statistical tabulations — which, it is hoped, will eventually be provided by the Library's electronic data programs — it is difficult to arrive at an exact ratio between the annual book production and the Library's acquisitions for the countries for which the Division is responsible. The Library's production of proof cards, however, can serve as a rough guide. The time lag in producing the cards and the inclusion of retrospective materials distort the publication-procurement ratios somewhat with respect to time, but the totals are instructive. The Library produced approximately 60,000 proof cards for our area in FY 1975 (21,000 for the USSR, 20,000 for countries using the German language, and the remainder for the other countries) or an overall average of one-third of the total book production of those countries. Inasmuch as selections are made on the basis of potential research value, this would seem to be a quite satisfactory proportion.

The Division must also take into account publications in English and other West European languages dealing with topics from our area. The extent of such publications is exemplified by Books in Print for 1974, in which there are over 1,500 listings under the heading "Russia" (with subheadings) alone. Further, the 1973 volume of The American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies, compiled in this Division, lists more than 4,000 books and articles published by U.S. and Canadian authors in that year.

For most countries of the Division's assigned area, "bulk" procurement agreements — blanket orders, the Foreign Currency Program, or NPAC agreements — are operative, the exceptions being Albania, Cyprus, Greece, and Hungary. For those countries, the Division's recommending officers must make title-by-title examinations of the relevant acquisitions sources. The staff members must also act to obtain materials that are not provided routinely by the bulk procurement programs and monitor these programs with respect to the quantity and quality of the receipts. Particular scrutiny has been given the relatively new blanket-order program for Yugoslavia, which was begun late in FY 1974 to replace the discontinued PL-480 program for that country. In the course of acquisitions activities, the staff members examined more than 75,000 lists and offers and made over 37,000 recommendations in FY 1975.

Budgetary exigencies required a continuing survey of current subscription lists, in which connection recommendations were made for the addition of essential new titles and the elimination of titles that did not meet collection criteria or which were being received in uneconomical multiple copies.

Often we must actively search for new sources. For example, Albania's political isolation since 1945 has made the procurement of titles from Albania difficult and irregular. Attempts to procure such publications directly from Albania or through the university in Priština, Yugoslavia, which serves the Albanian minority in that country, at first seemed promising but failed to meet our needs. Therefore it was gratifying that the Division was able to locate a domestic dealer who can supply Albanian publications. Some substantial additions to the Library's holdings have already been made through that dealer and a blanket-order arrangement is now being negotiated.

Several significant items were acquired in FY 1975. A highlight was the purchase at auction, at a very reasonable price, of a first edition of Kronyka Czeská (Prague, 1541) by Václav Hájek z Libočan. This influential Czech work, for 300 years a major source for historical writing on Bohemia, greatly enriches the Library's strong collection on the cultural and religious history of the Czech renaissance. Very few copies of this first edition are extant outside Czechoslovakia. Further highlights were the acquisition of first editions of works by three nineteenth-century Serbian authors, including Gorski vijenac, the notable epic poem by Petar Njegoš Petrović, Prince-Bishop of Montenegro, and the missing volumes of Ezhegodnik statistiki, the statistical handbook of the Russian Empire. This work is not available in its entirety elsewhere in the country. Several other acquisitions merit special attention. A collection of 119 reference works about Hungary and Finno-Ugrian studies was presented to the Library by the Director of the Library of the Hungarian Parliament in a ceremony held on November 18, 1974. Mrs. Karel Absolon gave the Library 19 titles written or edited by her late husband, a pioneer scholar in archaeology and speleology, who was associated with the museum in Brno, Czechoslovakia. The thirty-one-volume author and subject index of the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte of Stuttgart, Germany constitutes a guide to books and articles on international affairs since the beginning of World War I. In the field of modern Greek studies, forty-five titles were recommended from the list of publications of the Institut français d'Athènes.

This year particular attention has been given to microforms and reprints. Recently the prices which book dealers ask for "hard copies" have risen greatly, so that reproductions at lower cost are increasingly attractive. Also, much of the paper used several decades ago in this Division's geographic area is now severely deteriorated and the availability of more durable forms helps remedy this situation. Among the materials of this nature that have been recommended or acquired are films of the Lithuanian daily newspaper Lietuva, issued under governmental sponsorship in Kaunas in 1919–28, and a number of volumes of Chronik of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of L'viv, an important institution in Ukrainian national and literary life of the early twentieth century. It was also recommended that the Library acquire a reprint of the very important Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów slowiańskich, a sixteen-volume geographic dictionary of Poland and other Slavic lands that appeared originally in 1880–1914, to replace the Library's present copy which is in poor condition.

A field of particular current interest, and one which will probably draw an increasing number of inquiries, is the Bicentennial of the American Revolution. Already many publications have been issued on this topic in the countries of our area and we have recommended many useful retrospective and current titles. The Polish specialist, for example, has recommended the purchase of a biography of the Italian Abbé Piatolli, who was an acquaintance of Jefferson when the latter was Minister to France. Piatolli later went to Poland and served as one of the channels through which the Poles learned of American philosophical and political concepts, some of which influenced the Polish constitution of May 3, 1791. The Hungarian specialist's survey of early American-Hungarian relations revealed that three major libraries in Budapest and the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia have some materials, hitherto little known, which they are willing to make available to the Library in reproduction. Among German-language publications of this period, the Division initiated the procurement of an early German translation of Franklin's Autobiography, published in Pennsylvania, as well as a number of early Pennsylvania imprints in German or Pennsylvania Dutch on the religious life of the young American nation, and a major German dissertation and bibliography on the American Revolution and Germany. Some interesting Soviet titles were also acquired, including Nikolai N. Iakovlev's Vashington (Moscow, 1973), probably the most extensive biography of Washington in Russian, and the two-volume Materialy pervogo simpoziuma sovetskikh istorikov-amerikanistov (Moscow, 1973), the report of a symposium held in 1971 by leading Soviet historians of the United States.

The Division has assisted other units of the Library in acquisition matters by providing information about publications and sources which fall within the fields of responsibility of these units. The Division has also cooperated with other organizations and institutions, either through occasional consultation on specific acquisition problems or on a more regular basis, as in the selections by the Polish specialist of titles from Poland for 18 American libraries participating in the PL-480 program.

To sum up, we believe that we can feel justifiable pride in having helped to maintain and extend the Library's collections on our area, which are the most extensive collections outside that area itself. These holdings give the Division the capacity to serve the government and its other clients with a range of information unmatched elsewhere in the country.

II. ORGANIZATION OF THE MATERIALS

Upon assuming responsibility for the Slavic Room, the Assistant to the Chief, in consultation with the Division's area specialists and Slavic Room staff, made a thorough study of the collections, reader aids, service and use patterns, equipment, and physical layout of the Slavic Room and Deck 18. The following changes have been made or are planned as a consequence of that study.

A periodic review of the collections by the area specialists was instituted to ensure currency and to monitor the size of the collections. A core reference collection on Berlin and East Germany was begun: when completed it will comprise about 350 volumes and bring to 14 the number of country reference collections in the Slavic Room. The roster of serials displayed in the Slavic Room was revised and reduced on the basis of reader use and recommendations by the area specialists. This relieved some of the overcrowding in the reader area without appreciably reducing browsing potential, because of the nearness of the current serials deck (Deck 18). The frequently requested samizdat materials were organized and moved into the Slavic Room, and the East European telephone directory collection was updated and expanded to include the seven countries added to the Slavic Room collections in the past two years.

A card file supplement to the Cyrillic Union Catalog (CUC) was established in the Slavic Room principally to record the status of Yudin items currently being cataloged, but also for ready reference. Presently it comprises more than 12,000 titles of older (pre–1950) Cyrillic alphabet items cataloged since the discontinuation of the CUC. The CUC itself has been moved to Deck 33 and replaced in the Slavic Room by a microprint copy with reader. In the Slavic Room, the CUC occupied a considerable portion of the reader area and was used primarily by Library staff; thus, the new location, adjacent to the Slavic Union Catalog, other specialized catalogs, and the Main Catalog, would appear to offer advantages to searchers, while the microprint copy is sufficient for the needs of the Slavic Room.

The time and density patterns of reader use over a year's time showed that the number of readers using the Slavic Room after 5 p.m. did not warrant the continuation of evening service. Following a decision by the Library administration, evening service was discontinued beginning May 5, 1975, and arrangements were made to transfer materials from the Slavic Room to a reading room with evening service to accommodate readers who wished to continue their research after the Slavic Room had closed.

The continuing space problem on Deck 18, resulting from strictly limited space allotment and a steadily increasing number of new titles, has been solved in part; approximately 1,000 shelves were added to the bays assigned to the Division and further additions are being considered; the number of service sets on the Deck was reduced by eliminating certain categories of serials not of research value or available elsewhere; and the number of duplicates of current titles kept on the Deck was decreased. The drastic reduction in the volume of newspaper issues transferred from other agencies, authorized last fiscal year, went into full effect this year and has freed much needed shelf space, without detriment to the coverage of the collection. Finally, several large backlogs were cleared away through the use of overtime, namely, 80 titles of newspaper-format periodicals in 283 volumes (11,228 issues) were readied for microfilming, 1,250 volumes of periodicals were prepared for binding, and 645 issues of irregular serials were sorted and assigned for binding or shelflisting.

New display shelving for periodicals, a new card file, and the addition of an exhibit case to the Slavic Room are planned to improve the appearance of the room and to stimulate reader interest. Means of establishing a subject index to the monographs and serials in the Slavic Room and on Deck 18 are being studied, including the possibility of drawing on existing machine-readable records.

Considerable progress has been made this year toward reducing the residual, partially cataloged collections in the Division's custody. Arrangements have been made whereby the Shared Cataloging Division will catalog the Cyrillic 4 monographs, comprising an estimated 14,500 items (11,000 titles), with the cooperation of this Division. The Division's Soviet area specialist will assign cataloging priorities, and the cataloging will be done on a batch basis, by LC classification. A similar arrangement initiated last year with the Descriptive Cataloging Division to catalog the residual Yudin collection has proved successful — more than half of the residue has been cataloged, and good reader service has been maintained during cataloging. An arrangement has been made with the Rare Book Division, by which that Division will shelflist and maintain the Plochev collection of early Bulgarian books, now in the custody of this Division. It is hoped that a means will be found for cataloging the major collection remaining under partial bibliographic control in the Division's custody, namely, the Cyrillic 4 serials.

The Division's card files and reference aids were updated. About 8,700 items were added to the area card file of books and periodical articles in West European languages on the social, political, and cultural life of Eastern Europe. A sizable portion of these additions was supplied by the American Bibliography project. Approximately 900 cards were prepared for the Slavic Room shelf list, and more than 1,300 entries were added to the visible file of unbound Slavic and Baltic publications received in the Slavic Room. The pamphlet collection and the clipping file of articles from the New York Times were also expanded.

One indication of the demand for materials in the custody of the Division is provided by loan figures. Approximately 2,000 items were charged for circulation within the Library, and about 800 items for interlibrary loan.

III. USE OF THE MATERIALS

a. Reference

"What is the answer?" — There was silence. — "Then, what is the question?" Those were the last recorded words of Gertrude Stein and they seem quite applicable to the conduct of our reference work. In responding to a multitude of inquiries our specialists often have to reply not only to the question posed but to further questions implied by the original request. There are times when an inquirer must be told of nuances in interpretation or of additional sources apt to provide a more rounded view of his topic.

We must also carefully consider the background and needs of each inquirer. A professor at Princeton obviously requires a more elaborate answer to his question about Russian partisan activity during the Second World War than does a correspondent who asks about the inscription on a Russian postage stamp. However, whether simple or complex, each query demands the best use of the Library's resources and the Division's area and subject attention.

An idea of the spectrum and variety of questions posed can be gained from the Division's correspondence files and from a review of the large number of inquiries answered in person or by telephone. Russia and the Soviet Union continued to be the focus of reference requests that spanned several centuries of history and many fields of scholarly interest. A professor at the University of Aberdeen was interested in the history of the Library's manuscript English translation of an important political document of Catherine the Great. The editor of a widely circulated publication inquired about Soviet writings on parapsychology. A public library in New York asked about sources of information on Russian printing in the seventeenth century. The Director of the Lenin State Library in Moscow was sent references to works dealing with the acquisition of the Yudin Collection by the Library of Congress.

Questions on other countries were equally varied in subject matter and complexity. The Bulgarian Embassy requested information about American scholars studying Bulgarian affairs. A professor in Georgia was furnished a survey of literature dealing with the German Catholic-oriented Zentrum party of the pre–1933 era. The major Serbian cultural institution, Matica Srpska, inquired about sources for a bibliography of American works by or about Yugoslav writers and was given a detailed reply as to appropriate printed materials and repositories. The Hungarian ancestry of the present queen of Great Britain was the subject of another inquiry. Considerable bibliographic sleuthing was needed to trace the fluctuating structure of higher education in Czechoslovakia since 1968.

Several authors turned to the Division for advice and information. A well known American biographer consulted us about the Polish husband of Eleanor Medill (Cissy) Paterson, publisher of the Washington Times-Herald. A novelist inquired about sources on the life of King Peter I of Serbia. The National Geographic Society was supplied information on Latvian and Lithuanian national costumes.

Interest in political topics remained strong. The recent events in Greece called for the Division's expertise on modern Greek affairs, and a scholar in Albany was furnished data on the reactions of the United States and the United Nations to the events in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and 1968.

With the approach of the Bicentennial year, many inquiries have focused on the American Revolution itself and the aspects of American history which justify our national motto "E pluribus unum." The subject matter of these inquiries included the Finnish ancestry of John Morton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; Greeks in America in the eighteenth century; works on current Soviet interpretations of the Revolutionary period; sources on Kosciuszko and his part in the Battle of Saratoga; and American-German relations in the eighteenth century.

Many units of the Library availed themselves of the Division's area specialization. For example, the Central European specialist translated the Library's information pamphlet into German for the Information Office. The Latin American, Spanish, and Portuguese Division was provided bibliographic references for its Handbook of Latin-American Studies. Translations were routinely prepared for the Congressional Research Service and, in one instance, a lengthy handwritten appeal by a dissident Soviet citizen to L.I. Brezhnev was translated "at lightning speed" for use at a congresswoman's press conference. The cataloging divisions, the Rare Book, Manuscript, Print and Photographs, and Music Divisions were assisted in dealing with problems touching on our area assignment, and the Geography and Map Division was regularly supplied information on forthcoming Polish cartographic publications.

Numerous government agencies, including the Naval War College, the National Portrait Gallery, the Bureau of the Census, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, and the State Department were served by the Division.

Broad assistance was also given to American and foreign academic and research institutions. There were questions from universities such as Columbia, Princeton, Michigan, Southern California, Texas, Harvard, North Carolina, Indiana, Ohio State, Alaska, and Hawaii. The American Historical Association, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Kosciuszko Foundation were also supplied information. Language and bibliographic help was afforded the American Film Institute in its preparation of a forthcoming catalog of feature films. Among the foreign institutions of learning served were the universities of Alberta and Tel-Aviv, the Centre de Documentation sur l'URSS et les Pays Slaves in Paris, and the Institute for Balkan Studies in Thessalonike, Greece.

The Division continued to provide service to the American Red Cross by translating letters that organization receives from the countries of our area.

The quantitative scope of the Division's reference work is reflected in the more than 42,000 direct reference services rendered by the Division, which included 1,920 letters representing a 19% increase over the preceding year.

The Division's reference capacities were greatly strengthened by substantial additions, made by the staff, to its area card file and to The American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies file. Both these files are used steadily by staff and readers.

However great the satisfaction one derives from knowing that his reference mission has been accomplished, it is always gratifying to receive explicit expressions of appreciation from others. A few excerpts from the numerous letters which the Division received in FY 1975 are quoted as examples. "Thank you for your valuable comments and advice regarding my projected book on Austrian constitutional history," "...thank you for help in researching the higher education system in Bulgaria. Your efforts saved me much time while I was in Washington and provided some sources I might not have found alone," "When I pursue the various leads you have given me, I'm sure you will have solved my problem."

b. Bibliography

Compilation of The American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies is the principal bibliographic project of the Division. This annual bibliography is a key reference tool in the field for both the academic and the government communities. It is produced in close cooperation with the sponsor and publisher, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), the leading professional association in this country in Slavic and East European studies. By assuming responsibility for preparing this bibliography, the Library has taken a giant step toward becoming a bibliographic center of Slavic and East European studies in this country.

The 1973 volume of the bibliography, the first to be compiled in the Division, appeared this spring in an attractive format and has been given the widest possible exposure to libraries and the profession, here and abroad. Its 4,754 entries, arranged in broad subject categories with geographic subdivisions, treat the humanities and social sciences in the Slavic and East European countries, as well as Austria, the Byzantine Empire, Finland, and Turkey as they relate historically to the aforementioned countries. Books, articles, published reports, dissertations, and book reviews by U.S. and Canadian authors are cited, as well as selected English-language works published abroad. The manuscript for the 1973 volume was delivered in card form to the AAASS in the fall of 1974, the earliest compilation time for an annual volume in many years. The 1974 and 1975 volumes are in preparation, with work on the 1974 volume in the final stages. The 1974 volume is scheduled for publication in 1975.

The bibliography is truly a Division effort — all area specialists and senior reference librarians participate in the screening or compilation aspects, with the Assistant to the Chief serving as editor. The Division staff members are supplied, on a continuing basis, with cards prepared by the bibliography project in their fields of specialization. In addition, the project draws on bibliographic sources and services of other divisions of the Library, in particular the Serial Division, the Shared Cataloging Division, the MARC Development Office, the Information Systems Office, and the Congressional Research Service. This extensive use of Library of Congress facilities has made it possible to expand the coverage of the bibliography significantly, nearly doubling the number of entries of any previous annual volume produced since 1956 by the previous compliers, Indiana University and the Ohio State University. The compilation of this bibliography has greatly strengthened the reference potential of the Division and has stimulated acquisitions activities.

The Division's plans include the preparation of revised and expanded editions of two major Division publications which are out of print and for which there has been a steady demand. A fourth revised and updated edition of The USSR and Eastern Europe: Periodicals in Western Languages, which will comprise an annotated listing of about 900 periodicals published in or pertaining to the USSR and eight other East European countries, is now being prepared. Over the years this publication has become a unique and indispensable reference tool for area studies, as evidenced by the need for a fourth edition. As a result of rapid exhaustion of the original work, a second edition of The Federal Republic of Germany: A Selected Bibliography of English-Language Publications, which will contain about 1,000 entries, is in preparation. The National Carl Schurz Association and the Conference Group on German Politics have offered financial support to make the implementation of the project possible.

As a contribution to the acquisitions operations of the library community, the Division area specialists continued to prepare lists of recent reference books by country or area for the Foreign Acquisitions Newsletter of the Association of Research Libraries. On a more local level, the Division staff cooperated in the Second Reference Roundtable exhibit held in May 1975 under the auspices of the District of Columbia Library Association. The works displayed in our area were included in a publication, Specialists' Choice: Important Reference Works in the Mid–70s, which served as a guide to the exhibit.

The Inventory of Standard East European Statistical Holdings in U.S. and Foreign Libraries, to which the Division contributed special background reports on Romania and Yugoslavia as well as lists of LC holdings, has been converted to machine-readable form and is now available in printout from the International Development Research Center of Indiana University. The data of this inventory, which was commissioned by the American Council of Learned Societies, is retrievable on the basis of publication title, country of origin, subject category, and holdings by library.

Polish Books in English, compiled by Janina W. Hoskins and issued in December, 1974 by the Government Printing Office, evinced initial strong demand and has been the object of many inquiries.

The Greek area specialist is preparing an annotated inventory of the Greek incunabula held by the Library of Congress and other major libraries.

Ad hoc bibliographies, some quite extensive, were also prepared on a wide range of subjects, for example, American publications on Austria, works on Albanian history in Albanian, and basic reference works for American diplomats assigned to Poland.

IV. ADMINISTRATION AND PERSONNEL

No changes in staff occurred during the fiscal year. Mr. George E. Perry, Head, Slavic Room and Area Specialist (Greek), was reassigned to the position of Greek Area Specialist in the Slavic and Central European Division Office, effective October 15, 1974; the Assistant to the Chief was placed in charge of the Slavic Room as of that date. The stability of the Division's personnel roster was exemplified by the service awards presented this year to three staff members who have spent all or the major portion of their federal service in this Division. Dr. Robert V. Allen received his 25-year Federal Service pin, Dr. Elemer Bako his 20-year pin, and Ms. Ruzica Popovitch her 10-year pin.

Several staff members served on committees or held offices in Library of Congress employee organizations. Mr. Albert E. Graham was elected Division Representative and Mrs. Janie M. Ricks alternate representative to the Reference Department's Human Relations Committee. Mr. Graham is Vice President of that committee. Mr. George E. Perry is president of the Ethnic Employees of the Library of Congress.

Division staff members took an active part in the Library's training programs by participating in course offerings and by orientation presentations. On several occasions, the Soviet area specialist briefed the participants in the Library's Professional Orientation Series on the Division's mission, activities, and relationship to Slavic and East European studies in the United States and overseas, and introduced the Library's interns, one of whom spent some time in the Division, to the Library's Slavic and East European programs and collections. The Chief and Assistant to the Chief attended the course "Labor-Management Relations for Library of Congress Supervisors," which was organized and presented by the U.S. Civil Service Commission Bureau of Training under the sponsorship of the Library's Training Center.

V. EXTERNAL RELATIONS

Contacts with individuals and learned bodies in many spheres of cultural endeavors in this country and abroad offered the Division an invaluable stimulus and opportunity for an exchange of experience and information. In the process, we were able to make known intramural services and operations and to gain first-hand valuable insights into research trends, documentation developments, and publication activities in the field of our area assignments. Beyond this, such rapport has yielded tangible results, in the form of institutional support of Division projects and invitations to the Division to participate in cooperative library undertakings.

Recognition of the professional standing of our specialists was manifested in invitations to serve as members of committees of national associations. For instance, the Chief, during his seventh term on the Joint Committee on East Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, chaired its Publications Subcommittee and served as representative for Soviet and East European area studies of the Task Force on Library and Information Resources of the Government/Academic Interface Committee on International Education, whose deliberations resulted in its survey: Library Resources for International Education (Washington, 1975). He was also appointed a member of the ARL Acquisitions Committee. The Assistant to the Chief continued to serve on the Bibliography and Documentation Committee of the Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. The Central European area specialist remained active in the Conference Group on German Politics, which is lending its support to a new edition of the Division's bibliography on the Federal Republic of Germany.

Attendance at professional conferences — although limited by the dearth of travel funds — was another medium for furthering professional advancement and for bringing the Division's services and activities to the attention of the scholarly community. The Assistant to the Chief and the Polish area specialist attended the International Slavic Conference in Banff, Canada in September of 1974, and the latter also participated in the Congress of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America in Montreal in May, 1975.

The Division responded to requests from many government agencies for expert assistance, for example, our area specialists provided cultural background briefings for U.S. Foreign Service officers assigned to posts in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia and, in connection with the Bicentennial, the Voice of America taped interviews with the Hungarian and Polish specialists for broadcast to Hungary and Poland.

The professional staff continued to keep in close touch with the cultural representatives of Central and East European embassies accredited in Washington. On numerous occasions, embassies called on the Division for services and, in return, sometimes proved helpful in furthering the Library's exchange programs. In particular, cultural officers of the Austrian, Bulgarian, Czechoslovak, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Yugoslav embassies availed themselves of the Division's facilities and know-how, and the Czechoslovak ambassador and his wife were given a special orientation tour.

Virtually hundreds of visitors from home and abroad were welcomed to the Division and received briefings or advice on special research problems. These included members of the various academies of sciences, such as the historians Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov from the Soviet Union and Fritz Klein from the German Democratic Republic, the economist George Baev from Bulgaria, government officials engaged in cultural work, such as Miss Ilse Cohnen of the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, Chairman Sergei Mikhailov of the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers, Walery Kujawski of the Polish Ministry of Education, Traian Ivanov, Director of the Bulgarian Copyright Office, and General Tomschitz of the Austrian army. In connection with the IFLA meeting in Washington, D.C., the Division was visited by representatives of several participating national libraries or heads of leading libraries, including the directors of the Hungarian Parliamentary Library, the Lenin State Library, the Polish National Library, and the Parliamentary Library of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Among the distinguished scholars whose names appeared in our visitors' book were the historian Rade Petrović of Sarajevo University; Aulis J. Joki, Professor of Finno-Ugrian Linguistics at Helsinki University; Martin Broszat, Director of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History, and numerous American scholars such as Professor George F. Kennan of Princeton University and Professor Robert Byrnes of Indiana University.

VI. PROFESSIONAL BUT UNOFFICIAL ACTIVITIES

Within the framework of this report, it is possible to provide only a few examples of the "freelance" professional activities of our staff.

Dr. Robert V. Allen continued to supply the American Historical Review with lists of articles on Russian history.

Dr. Elemer Bako coordinated the Bicentennial program of Hungarian organizations. In this connection, he published a biography of Colonel Michael de Kovats (July-August issue of the American Bicentennial) and contributed to the Katolikus Magyarok Vasárnapja (Catholic Hungarian Sunday).

Dr. John P. Balys addressed an Elizabeth, N.J. meeting on Vytautas the Great and made a presentation on postwar Baltic folklore to a Columbia University seminar in April, 1975. He also contributed to a Latvian bibliography in Acta Baltica (vol. 13, 1974) and wrote on Lithuanian materials in the Library of Congress for Lituanus (Winter 1974).

Mr. Douglas N. Cruickshank received a Master's degree in Russian studies from George Washington University in February 1975.

Mr. Albert E. Graham lectured in March 1975 at the University of Maryland on the Soviet military-industrial complex.

Dr. Paul L. Horecky served as project director and chief editor of two projects sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, a Guide to Yugoslav Libraries and Archives, published in 1975, as well as of East Central and Southeastern Europe: a Handbook of Library and Archival Resources in North America, scheduled for publication by the CLIO Press in late 1975.

Dr. Janina W. Hoskins lectured on Polish culture at the American University and on the Library's Polish collections at the Public University in Philadelphia in February 1975.

Mr. George E. Perry worked in the Bicentennial Program of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association, attending in this connection a national conference in Washington, D.C., in January 1975 and a Maryland Bicentennial Commission Conference in Columbia, Md., in April 1975.

Ms. Ruzica Popovitch began her master's program in library science at Catholic University in January 1975.

Dr. Arnold H. Price presented a paper on the role of Germanic warrior clubs in the historical process to a local history group, participated in several German history seminars, and continued to supply the American Historical Review with lists of articles on Central European history.