Boris Yeltsin, 1996–1999

Abstract

This chapter assesses Boris Yeltsin's second presidential term, which was something of a golden age in Library of Congress cooperation with Russian institutions. The overriding objective of Russian foreign policy was still to join Europe and the West, and cooperation with the Library of Congress and other Western cultural institutions clearly was seen by the authorities as helping to advance this objective. The second half of the 1990s was also the period in which the digital library revolution took off. On October 13, 1994, the Library of Congress officially began its National Digital Library program with a pledge to digitize and make accessible online by 2000, five million items relating to US history from its own collections and those of its partners. Under these relatively favorable circumstances, the Library of Congress was able to pursue a wide range of projects with Russian libraries and archives in the late 1990s, most of which carried over into the early 2000s. These projects ranged from professional conferences and seminars involving historians, librarians, and archivists to exchanges of people and library materials, to physical and online exhibitions, to the production of books and reports and of a television documentary, and to the ambitious US–Russian Meeting of Frontiers digital library.