The Foreign Periodicals comprise 3.5 million European-language journals, and other serials dating back to the 17th century. A special place is occupied by journals sorted by language. They form the Slavica Collection consisting of periodicals in the Slavonic languages (Bulgarian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, etc.), dated back the early 19th century, and the Finnish Collection [items published from the mid 19th century to the present].
Besides actual periodicals the stock includes the transactions of learned societies and institutions, bulletins and other ongoing publications in European languages. From the first years of the foundation of the Library, the Journal Room provided access to current scientific journals on almost all areas of knowledge.
The Library possesses many unique editions, for example, the French Journal des savants, which, according to Voltaire, 'is the prototype of all publications of this type'; the Mercure de France since 1686 onwards, and others. The holdings embrace an extensive collection of natural sciences journals of historical and scientific value. They also include almost complete sets of the journals Nature, Science, Virchow's Archive fur pathologische und Physiologie und fur klinische Medizin, Journal de Chirurgie, Lancet.
Such magazines as Annalen der Physik und Chemie, Pfluger`s Archiv für die gesamte Physiologie der Menschen und der Tiere, J. Liebig`s Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie were founded or published by famous scientists, chemists Liebig and Fresenius, physiologist Pfluger, physicist Poggendorf. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London provides an introduction to invaluable observations and discoveries made by famous scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These are articles by I. Newton, A. Smith, M. Faraday, D. Joule, and others. The collection also contains works of the largest European academies in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Brussels.
The holdings store leading European magazines in various fields of learning: natural sciences, medicine, social sciences, law, technology, belles-lettres, architecture, the arts, technology, and classical philology.
In the early 1990s, the Library received magazines on literature and arts by the Russian community abroad from limited access collections of the "Special Storage Section". The Modern Russian Literature and Culture. Studies and Texts, Lauren Slawistik, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach published articles about the great Russian poets Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, works by Mikhail Kuzmin, Vladimir Khodasevich, Boris Pasternak, Velimir Khlebnikov and others. Noteworthy are bibliographic materials on Russian emigration (there is a union index of articles from journals of 1920 – 1980 in Russian), issued in Bibliotheque Russe de L’Institut D’Etudes Slaves.
Most of the Slavica Collection is made up of publications on history, culture, economics, philology, and medicine.
The Finnish Collection is mainly represented by humanitarian magazines. The collection has publications in Finnish and Swedish, but, as a rule, these are incomplete sets. The most complete sets have such journals as Duodecim published by the Finnish Society of Physicians (1885 – 2012, with certain gaps) and the historical journal Arkisto (1868 – 2010, also with gaps).
Interesting materials can be found on the pages of the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjalllisuuden Seura) (1967 – 2011). These are biographical, historical, local lore, linguistic works about the outstanding people of Finland (K. Mannerheim, J. Sibelius, A. Kivi, etc.), its history, literature, language, cities and customs.
Description of the Collection
Brief Summary
Collections