State cultural institutions
"Ulyanovsk Regional Scientific Library n.a. Lenin “



Information
The State Cultural Institution “Ulyanovsk Regional Scientific Library n.a. Lenin"- is the central library of the Ulyanovsk region of the universal profile. This is the regional repository of printed documents, the center of local history and methodological work, the research and information agency, which serves enterprises and organizations of the city and region.
The history of the library starts on April 18, 1848,when Simbirsk Karamzin Public Library was opened among the first fifty provincial public libraries in Russia. Library in Simbirsk was opened due to the funds and donations of the local population as a monument to the famous countryman and the first Russian historian – N.M. Karamzin, and at the request of the local noblemen the library was named after Karamzin.
Nowadays the library - is a large complex of specialized halls, book stacks, and premises for cultural programs, recreation and communication, fitted with modern electronic equipment, and covering more than 10 thousand square meters. The library provides free access to domestic and foreign information resources to meet and develop professional, cultural and educational demands of the regional population.

In the Library they carry out scientific research, the priorities of which are regional history, history of the regional libraries and book collections of the historical part of the Fund.
Being a regional methodological center, the library provides practical assistance to the municipal libraries. It participates in the elaboration of the legal framework for librarianship at the regional level, contributes to legal and social protection of libraries and their staff.
The library is a member of the Russian Library Association, the International Association of Museums of Russia, and the Academy of Informatization.

The library stock and services
The library stock has about 3 million items. Those are mainly domestic and foreign books, magazines and newspapers, regulatory and technical documentation, notes, audiovisual materials, editions on the micromedia, electronic publications. The service is provided in 17 specialized departments of the library, located in two buildings, including: the department of local history and bibliography, the department of reading rooms, the department of technical and agricultural literature, the department of literature on the art, the department of rare books and manuscripts, the department of foreign languages, circulation department, department of interlibrary loan, scientific-methodical department.
At the international level, the library carries out the book exchange with the Library of the USA Congress, the Institute n.a.  Goethe in Germany, the Columbia University, and correspondence with the descendants I.A. Goncharov, D.P. Oznobishin in France, etc.
Here functions the Public Works Center of legal and business information, which welcomes the readers into the world of legal knowledge. The main purpose of the Center of legal Information is to teach the citizens how to defend themselves by legal means, to show that people can defend their interests in court. The Center provides the visitors with free access to the reference and legal systems to search for the legal documents and legislation of Russia and the Ulyanovsk region.

The library also offers some additional paid services: Internet access, photocopying, scanning of documents, typing and editing of text on the computer , record of information to the electronic media, printing, binding and laminating, etc.

Membership Clubs
One of the main activities of library is the promotion of reading. Readers are invited to visit book-illustrative exhibitions, literature reviews, conversations, creative meetings, literary and musical evenings and other events related to books and literature.
Cultural and recreational activities of the library are performed by its membership clubs and creative associations: the historical center "Clio", the club of the local history "Globe", the club studying Esperanto "We are Esperantists", the club "Linguistic living room", the club “Needlework”, the club "Our Garden", the club "School of Health", the fiction club "Literary Thursdays". The solemn hall of the library hosts the major literary and musical events, which are visited by the citizens and guests of the city.
The days of the bibliography and information days are held systematically.

Museum on the basis of the Library
In the library there is a Memorial Museum – “Karamzin Public Library”. The library has always acted as an initiator and organizer of events related to the name of N.M. Karamzin.
The exposition carefully re-creates not only the look, but also the atmosphere of one of the first provincial public libraries of Russia. The three rooms of the former library – the porters, the reading room and the room for committee meetings – now look like they did in the second half of the XIX century. Founding of the Museum made it possible to start up a research work on the description of unique book collections, and to put them in scientific and cultural turnover.
Book collections of XV-XX centuries, stored in the Ulyanovsk regional scientific library n.a. Lenin, are the world culture heritage, unique in their completeness and value. The library keeps the private collections of N.M. Karamzin, N.M. Yazykov, D.P. Oznobishin, Emperor Alexander III and other collections.
In 1881 the writer Goncharov I.A. sent his personal library to his motherland - to Simbirsk. Most of these books had been presented to the famous novelist by his friends, colleagues and admirers of his talent. Opening those books, one can see the inscriptions and autographs by N.A. Nekrasov, A.N. Ostrovsky, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, etc.

Contacts
432063, Ulyanovsk, str. Communisticheskaya, 3.
(8422) 44-30-99, fax (8422) 44-03-41
www.obllib.mv.ru
E-mail: lib@mv.ru

Operating hours:
Tuesday - Friday - 09.00 - 19.00
Saturday, Sunday - 10.00 - 18.00
Monday - closed
Last Friday of every month - Cleanup day

To join the library one must have a passport.