There are several collection highlights of note. These specific items are representative of the richness of the collections here at Illinois. If you are planning a research trip abroad, your time there will be more productive if you spend some time here scouting out which of your sources already exist in the U.S. or determining from archival guides which repositories will prove the most useful. General descriptions of holdings in each of the countries of the area follow. The Library holds approximately 190,700 volumes in the languages of the former Soviet Union, plus another 58,465 or so volumes on Russia and the former Soviet Union in other languages.
Coverage is good in all areas of the humanities and social sciences.
The Library has about 99,818 additional volumes of Russian and Ukrainian titles in microform, including most serials of importance that are not available in the original. There are also long runs on microfilm of some 155 newspapers in Russian, Ukrainian, and Estonian, including both pre-Revolutionary and Soviet titles. The library has complete runs of the most important 19th and 20th century Russian periodicals and newspapers on microfilm, microfiche, or in the original. Other significant holdings include near-complete collections of Russian books from the 17th and 18th centuries from major Russian repositories, and Russian book, periodical, and newspaper collections from the Hoover Institution, Harvard University, Columbia University and Library of Congress. Since 1977, the Slavic and East European Library has cooperated with the Slavic Department of the Helsinki University Library by selecting and microfilming scarce 19th and early 20th century book in the Helsinki collection and making them available to the international scholarly community.