WASHINGTON – Several participants of a weeklong leadership program “Celebration of Leadership in a Rule of Law Country” sponsored by the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation paid a visit to the Library of Congress on March 21. They were accompanied by Liudmyla Mazuka, wife of Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, and Embassy staffers.
Following a tour of the Library’s Great Hall, they presented 15 Ukrainian dictionaries, totaling 22 volumes, to Grant Harris, chief of the European Division, Regina Frackowiak and Jurij Dobczansky. These volumes are reprints of dictionaries originally published in the 1920s during the period of Ukrainianization and subsequently banned. Five of these volumes were sponsored by the Kyiv-City Rotary Club. The other 10 were published by the Ukrainian Language Institute and the Institute of Encyclopedic Research, both of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Interestingly, the Library of Congress collection of some 900 Ukrainian dictionaries had only one of the original publications. It was acquired February 21, 1930 – the year of its publication.
The first 10 volumes of the “Dictionary Heritage” series cover such diverse topics as chemistry, education, business, medicine, manufacturing, geology, mining, music, proverbs, geodesy and physics. Many include reciprocal indexes of terminology in Ukrainian, Russian, French and Latin. The dictionaries are now catalogued and assigned to the European Reading Room and the general collections. Most of the newly issued dictionaries are available online. Links to the full texts are included in the Library of Congress catalogue.