The Scientific Library of our Baltic International Academy is well known not only in Latvia, but also far beyond its borders. It is an authoritative member of the Association of Scientific Libraries of Latvia and has established scientific and information links with scientific libraries of the largest higher education institutions in Europe.
Here, you can often meet students and scientists from higher education institutions with which the BIA maintains scientific and study links under the ERASMUS+ international exchange programme. For example, recently, Tomasz Bugaj, a PhD student from the University of Silesia in Katowice, worked fruitfully here. He was collecting materials for his scientific work, which is devoted to the study of intercultural relations and the mutual influence of different cultures on each other, and told a lot of interesting things about the Academic Library of his university.
The story of the PhD student from Katowice awakened in the employees of our Scientific Library a desire to get to know the experience of their Polish colleagues better. This initiative was supported by the coordinator of the international ERASMUS+ programme Viktorija Petlak. And in February, the BIA librarian Kristina Lyakhova was given the opportunity to visit the Academic Library of the University of Silesia.
As she noted in her report on the trip, this library is one of the largest in Poland. Its collections contain more than 350 thousand publications in paper and electronic form in Polish, English and other languages. Lecturers and students have access to electronic catalogues and modern databases. A repository has been created here, in which doctoral dissertations are stored in digital format. The electronic index of the location of a particular book in the collections is used actively by employees of the library.
According to Kristina Lyakhova, a number of innovations of Polish colleagues can also be used in the Scientific Library of the BIA.
In the photos: One of the buildings of the University of Silesia in Katowice. Kristina Lyakhova gets acquainted with the collections of the Academic Library. A student of the university studies the novelties of the library.
Photos by Kristina Lyakhova
