The Journey of a Book: From Order to Reader
In 2026, the Department of Storage of the Main Collections of the Russian State Library turns 100. A full century for the country’s main book depository. To mark this anniversary, we continue our series of stories about its history, its people and its secrets.
The telelift (book lift) in the Russian State Library
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
You found a book in the catalogue, clicked the ‘Order’ button and a couple of hours later, you are holding it in your hands. What happened in those two hours? Where did the book go, how many hands did it pass through, what mechanisms helped it on its way? That is what today’s story is about.
Part 1. From order to request: the start of the journey
Today the ordering system is set up so that you can order a book from anywhere – from home, from the office, from the metro car on your way to the RSL. Just log into your personal account on the website, find the edition in the online catalogue and click ‘Order’.
The system then shows you:
where the book is kept (in the main building on Vozdvizhenka Street or in the Khimki complex),
how long it will take to become available (usually the same day if the book is at Vozdvizhenka, or the next day if the book is in Khimki),
which Reading Room you can collect it from.
If the book belongs to a restricted-access collection, special notes and instructions will appear on screen: for example, to work with documents from the FOU (for official use only) collection you need a written application and a covering letter from your organisation. Microfilms, meanwhile, can only be obtained in the Electronic Resources Reading Room – they are not available at the Main Circulation Desk.
That is what the reader sees. What do the system and the librarian see?
The moment the reader clicks ‘Order’, an electronic request is formed. It contains all the necessary information – the time of the order, the reader’s Reader Pass number, the reader’s name, the book’s shelfmark, its title, and its publication details.
If any problems arise, the reader can come to the library: the staff at the circulation desk are there to help. They can advise on how to place an order correctly, where to go for permission to order documents from the FOU collection, and which room to use for working with microfilms.
That, by the way, is an important detail: behind the seeming automation lies real human work. The system allocates orders, but if something goes wrong, people step in.
Once the request has reached a staff member on the relevant storage level, the most interesting part begins – the search for the book.
Part 2. How a book is found in the main building
So the electronic call slip has reached the terminal on the relevant tier. Now we shall go deep into the collection, along with that call slip.
In the storage, you will find silence and endless rows of shelves. Working here means constant movement: some curators clock up more than 7,000 steps in a shift. However, the key thing is not the steps, it is speed: you have half an hour from the moment an order comes in to pick the book. In that time, you need to find the item, check its condition and send it off to the reading room.
The most important thing in the call slip is the shelfmark. To the reader it is a string of letters and digits, but to a staff member it is a precise address telling you where the book is located among the miles of shelving.
Let’s take a real example. A reader ordered the book ‘On the Acclimatisation of Animals’ by Anatoly Petrovich Bogdanov with the shelfmark T 30/403.
Curator Anastasia Chudinova explains: “The first letter is the hall. Then the stack number and the position. A stack isn’t a single bookcase in the sense we usually think – it’s a precise classification: Hall T, Stack 30, Position 403.”
Numbering goes from bottom to top, zigzagging across the whole tier. The system is logical, but there are exceptions: sometimes a stack turns out not to be where you would expect it.
Books of different formats are stored differently. This is called ‘format-based arrangement’ – a system designed to save space. If a publication is, say, 50 centimetres tall, it physically will not fit on a standard shelf. Such books are removed from the main sequence and placed separately – at the end of a cabinet, on special freestanding shelves along the windows, and sometimes even on separate tiers that hold only large-format items.
The size of a book can sometimes be seen in the online catalogue. But there are also clues on the shelves themselves: pencil notes saying ‘large format’ or simply a title that gives the game away – ‘album’, ‘atlas’, ‘theatre designs’.
“There is a system; you just have to get used to it,” says Anastasia.
An experienced curator takes about two weeks to master the navigation. Then it becomes automatic.
Anastasia says: “I wanted to understand all this logic. I’m a bit of a maniac when it comes to work. I came in – and I realised: I’ve got to get my head around this straight away.”
The hardest part is when a book is not in its place. Then the investigation begins. The most common reason is an error in the shelfmark due to retroconversion – the transfer of paper documents into electronic form. When the cards from the general catalogue were scanned in the early 2000s, the technology sometimes mixed up letters and numbers. The curator works through the possibilities: it says 516 – maybe it’s 316? We’ll tell you more about that when we talk about the Department of Collection Organisation.
Every curator has their own tricks. If a book is not in its place, Anastasia checks ten books ahead and ten behind, then looks at the shelf above and the shelf below. Often the book has simply been shifted during dusting or moved during a collection audit – such processes are constantly going on in the depository. Meanwhile curator Elena Iovcheva arranges her requests in advance in such a way that she doesn’t have to walk in a circle but in a zigzag – that’s quicker.
The curators say that over the years you start to get a feel for who is ordering the books. “From the subjects of the orders you can tell: this one is writing a thesis, this one is preparing for a conference, and this one has just got interested in the topic. Someone orders every edition of Tolstoy – maybe they’re preparing a comparative study. But here’s a question: why, on the last working day of December, in the last hour, does someone always have to order Marxist-Leninist philosophy?”
Book demand has its seasons. 15–20 January – books about Lenin. On authors’ birthdays – Pushkin, Saltykov-Shchedrin – their books get ordered. Sometimes there are spikes: suddenly Dickens and Mark Twain start appearing in all the requests. More often than not, that means one of their anniversaries is coming up.
The head curator of the RSL Department of Main Collections, Natalia Kopylova, giving a tour of the book depository
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
After tours of the collection, many people get a Reader Pass and immediately order what they saw. Particularly popular are Alexander Benois’s ABC Book and Charles Perrault’s fairy tales. They are easy to find in the catalogue, and they go out to the Reading Rooms straight after the tour. Visitors often ask: Can you really order all this? The guides say: Yes. New readers see for themselves – they take the books that caught their eye, to look at them properly.
So, the book in the main building on Vozdvizhenka has been found. What happens to it next? It is sent via the telelift to the circulation desk – and the reader receives it on the same day. But if the item is kept in Khimki, then the logistics are different.
Part 3. The journey of a book from the Khimki Complex
The RSL Khimki Complex
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
If a book is kept not at Vozdvizhenka but at the RSL Khimki Complex, its journey to the reader is longer. And things are more complicated here. Electronic requests arrive in Khimki constantly, but the custodians collect the printed call slips at set times: at 9:00, 12:00, 13:00 and 15:00.
Requests come from everywhere: from Vozdvizhenka, from the Reading Rooms, from the Department of Reprography where readers order electronic copies of extracts from books. Each request is written down in a notebook – the old-fashioned way, to make sure nothing is lost. Then the requests are distributed across the storage levels. Each staff member takes a levels, goes to pick the books, comes back, and counts them. On each book, they stick a ‘Khimki’ stamp – so that at Vozdvizhenka its origin is immediately clear.
In total, four people work in the Khimki collection. And there are five storage levels. They get around 1,500 requests a month. A newcomer takes at least three months to find their bearings here: the topography is complicated, books in different languages and from different years are kept on different levels. Moreover, oversize items that didn’t fit on their own shelves have been moved to other places. You have to remember all that. On the shelves, the curators have even hung a special reference chart – so as not to get confused.
Books that are to be sent to the RSL Main Building are tied into bundles, counted, and checked against the notebook entries.
The van comes every day except Tuesdays and weekends. It brings back returns (books that have been handed back by readers) and collects new orders. If the van leaves the Main Building at 10 in the morning, it reaches Khimki around 11. The books usually arrive at Vozdvizhenka by three in the afternoon.
Though the logistics is reliable, accidents can still happen. Once the van broke down, and the staff called a taxi to the breakdown point and reloaded the books so as not to miss the deadline. “Because the reader was already told they could get their book,” explains custodian Svetlana. “That’s a responsibility.” And last winter, during a heavy snowfall, the van got stuck at a crossroads literally two steps from the library. “So one of our staff simply took the bundles of books and carried them by hand. Even though they are very heavy,” says Svetlana.
Sometimes a reader orders a book from Khimki and hopes to get it the same day. At that point, the curators just make a helpless gesture: “There is nothing we can do – you’ll have to wait. Or get your skates on and come here.”
Now, for items stored in the Khimki Complex, you can choose your pickup location: the RSL Main Building or Khimki itself. If a reader is willing to come to Khimki, they can choose Khimki and go there to collect the book that same day. But confusion does happen. Someone orders an item to be delivered to Khimki, and then calls the RSL: “Why hasn’t my book arrived at Vozdvizhenka?” They’re told: your book is waiting for you at Khimki. The reader is disappointed and asks for it to be changed. Sometimes the opposite happens – the order is sent to Vozdvizhenka, but the reader is already at Khimki. That’s rare, though; mostly everything goes according to plan.
Curator Ekaterina Kolodnikova laughs: “For many people, Khimki sounds like Mars. ‘Oh, fly to Mars and they’ll hand you the book personally.’”
The working day starts with picking call slips – that’s the main job. But there is plenty of other work too: inventories, sticking in labels, new acquisitions. “We do a lot of manual work,” say the custodians. “Manicures don’t stand a chance here.”
The most-ordered items at Khimki are publications in Russian; in second place are books in the national languages of Russia. In recent years, readers have mostly been asking for books published after the 1990s: history, fiction, science, and art. Earlier publications are requested much less often.
So, the book from Khimki is sent, it arrives at Vozdvizhenka and ends up with the reader. The whole process takes about a day, even if there is a snowfall.
Nowadays books move according to a tried-and-tested scheme – electronic requests, telelifts, daily van runs between the two storage sites. It all works quickly and almost invisibly to the reader. But it wasn’t always like that. Let’s take a look at what the journey of a book looked like before the age of electronic ordering.
Part 4. How it used to be
Until quite recently, the path of a book to the reader looked different. And it required much more effort from the reader.
The reader would come to the library, go to the catalogue – long rows of wooden drawers full of cards. They would find the card for the book they wanted, copy the details onto a call slip: their name and surname, their Reader Pass number, the author, the title, the place of publication, the shelfmark. A separate request was filled out for each book.
The reader would take the call slips to the circulation desk, hand them to the librarian, and wait – at least two hours. The requests were processed manually too, so the journey from request to book in hand took a long time.
The slips with the requests were placed into a capsule and sent to the storage using the pneumatic post. The pneumatic post worked at full capacity: requests arrived every half hour. A single capsule might hold one slip, or it might be packed to the brim.
For the curators, this meant a different rhythm of work. Processing one request could be quick (as long as the book was in its place and no one had ordered it before). But what if there were 5 such requests? Or 25? Then the large-format books were taken by staff on trolleys to the circulation desk. (Large-format books are still handled that way today.) The other books picked for readers were transferred to a vertical conveyor (the Sukhanovsky, named after its developer), then to a horizontal conveyor, from which the ordered items arrived at the circulation desks in the Reading Rooms. Then the telelift came to the RSL, and book delivery became faster.
Books from the Khimki complex were delivered only twice a week. Today’s daily transport is a huge step forward, one that is already taken for granted.
The pneumatic post, once the main method of transmitting call slips, is now rarely used – only for non-routine situations. For example, when there is an error in an electronic order and a paper request needs to be sent to the dispatch desk. And the books themselves, as we already know, are sent to the reader using the telelift. It is fast and reliable.
Ordering a book, which used to take hours and required the reader’s physical presence in the library, now takes minutes. Behind this progress lie decades of work by curators, engineers, and the people who devised all these systems.
Part 5. The finale: a book in the reader’s hands
A reader at the Russian State Library working with books in Reading Room no 3
Photo: Maria Govtvan, RSL
And now the book is found. It has been taken from the shelves of the Main Building’s depository or brought from Khimki – and now it is sitting on the circulation desk.
This journey – from the ‘Order’ button in the Electronic Catalogue to the book in the reader’s hands – is made by tens of thousands of items every day. And the curators walk their thousands of steps, decipher tricky shelfmarks, hunt down books, and send them off to readers
We have already described how the main collection is organised. Today – we traced the book’s journey to the reader. Next time we shall talk about how new publications enter the collection, who makes sure that books don’t fall apart with age, and what the scientific and methodological work in the main collection involves.
Material prepared by:
Head Curator of the RSL Department of Main Collections Natalia Kopylova
RSL Photo Editor Maria Govtvan.
Acknowledgments: 2nd Category Librarian Anastasia Chudinova, Head Librarian Elena Yovcheva, Head Librarian Svetlana Goryunkova, and 1st Category Librarian Ekaterina Kolodnikova. Special thanks to the RSL Deputy Director General for Storage and User Services Olga Serova for her valuable comments and support.
