The Fundamental Library of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The Fundamental Library of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences holds the status of a library of federal significance. The primary source of acquisition is the federal mandatory copy of documents. The library’s collections, overseen by the Department of Scientific Funds and its branches, include printed publications and documents dating from the 16th century to the present, in nearly all world languages, such as Russian, European, ancient, and modern Eastern languages, with a focus on social sciences. Highly valuable are the collections of bibliographic and reference publications and journals, many of which are available in complete sets that span over a century.
Information regarding the funds is catalogued within a comprehensive system of interconnected catalogues, digital databases, and both current and retrospective bibliographic indexes in the social and humanitarian sciences.
The Fundamental Library serves researchers of the Russian Academy of Sciences and other scientific institutions, as well as higher education faculty, graduate students and undergraduates.
The library stands as one of the largest centralized library networks in the social and human sciences, encompassing a central library and its branches, which feature 13 departments offering library and bibliographic services to humanities-focused academic institutions.
After surviving a fire in 2015, the Fundamental Library has focused on both monitoring its losses and initiating modernization efforts. These efforts include the development of digital catalogs, the creation of an open-access repository for social sciences of RAN institutes, and the digitization of collections to create content for the digital library.
The Fundamental Library is the pioneer in developing a regulatory, legal, and scientific-methodological framework for librarianship in the humanities.
The library holds membership in the Russian Library Association (RLA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA).