This past year God blessed the Ukrainian Education Center library with numerous donations and generous donors both in the US and in Kyiv. Throughout the year 606 new library items were donated by 49 different people. Thanks to Dr. Mack W. Craig's and Dr. Harold Shank's large donations of books, our history and art sections have significantly grown both in number and quality. After the renovation when we moved the library into a bigger room, the number of books and other items has grown so much, we felt the need to install another shelving unit. This new shelving unit gave us more space to continue widening our collection. We also went through the library and withdrew rarely checked out items and items in poor condition. As a result, with many new books being donated last year the quality of the library has improved significantly.

In 2006 we also made an effort to acquire materials that proved to be helpful and popular among our patrons. Our main goal was to buy more Christian books in Russian. Every month $100 was spent on Christian books and Bible study materials that we could find in Kyiv. 170 Christian books were added to our collection in 2006. We also gave some attention to building our DVD collection since demand for DVDs has already replaced the demand for video cassettes in Kyiv. We acquired 52 DVDs carefully choosing the ones we thought would be helpful for our patrons.

It was interesting to notice last year that students from more universities in Kyiv came to register in the UEC; whereas several years before most of our patrons were International Christian University students. Now we have patrons from all kinds of universities majoring in all kinds of subjects. It is an encouragement to us that with such a diverse library collection we are able to meet their education needs whether they are looking for a book in religion, business, foreign languages, art, social studies, or a CD with classical music.

Posted on April 10, 2007