Anthropology Professor Leads Efforts to Network Libraries in Former Czechoslovakia

Andrew Lass, associate professor of anthropology, has helped secure $476,000 in funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement a new phase in an ongoing, multifaceted project to modernize and electonically link libraries throughout two countries comprising the former Czechoslovakia.

And while, in the settling dust of post-Soviet rule, the Czech Republic and Slovakia may be strongly at odds over a wide variety of cultural and political issues, Lass believes that an interconnected library system--which will eventually allow access by all in the two countries to a unified international catalogue--may help to allay current tensions and secure efforts to build democratic goverments.

The latest funding will provide the necessary computer hardware and software to allow two university and one research libraries to collectively form a unique library information network in eastern Slovakia, the largest on-line library consortium in that country. This Kosice Library Information Network, or KOLIN, named after the town in which the libraries are primarily based, is conceived as an important extension to an ongoing effort, initiated five years ago by Lass, to link the libraries of both the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The steps to modernize and connect a library system that has suffered years of neglect under Communist rule began as an idea that was not nearly so exspansive in scope. Lass, the son of American journalists, grew up in Czechoslovakia until his family was expelled in 1973. In 1990, Lass returned to Prague to find that the collection in the Czech National Library, Europe's oldest, was in a state of extreme disarray. Many books and important manuscripts were rotting and many of the volumes within the library's collections had never been catalogued or even shelved.

Enlisting the assistance of the American Council of Library Resources, the Mid-Atlantic Conservation Trust, former Mount Holyoke College President Elizabeth Kennan and others, Lass was able to secure, in 1993, $1.1 million in funding from the Mellon Foundation and $200,000 from The Pew Charitable Trusts to help establish the Czech and Slovak Library Information Network (CASLIN). This effort has allowed radical modernizations to and linkings of libraries in Prague and Brno in the Czech Republic and in Bratislava and Martin in Slovakia. Since then, the project has been expanded into a second stage, including the transfer of the three million library cards of the Czech National Library into electronic media readable form and other efforts.

Lass has become the quintessential virtual project director and facilitator, keeping closely in touch with librarians and officials in Eastern Europe through daily Trans-Atlantic on-line communications. "My dream,"notes Lass, "is that someone in Southern Bohemia will have the same searchability of information as I do in South Hadley."

What began as an effort to protect old books is evolving into an unprecedented effort in the former Eastern Bloc that will allow world access to Eastern European culture, bringing access for all to libraries within the two Republics while allowing access for library users within the two Republics to on-line catalogues, manuscripts, and materials throughout the world.