I had to spend the beginning of this week for writing some more abstracts for our abstract journal, so I’m posting with a delay again.  The dry books have finally been taken out of the building of my institute (INION).  I took part in packing the last newspapers on Saturday, and the rest of them was packed on Sunday without me and taken away on Monday.  Thanks to our volunteers—we wouldn’t be able to do all this work in three weeks by ourselves.  One more thanks to our sponsor whose name I don’t know and who bought for us boxes, bags, sticky tape, clothes and water for volunteers etc.  It wouldn’t be easy to get such money from the Federal Agency of Scientific Organizations.

At present, almost all the dry books are stored in Lyubertsy near Moscow, we’ve been given a building there in an industrial zone of the publishing centre of the All-Russian Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), and it was told we would be given one more building there later.  Tomorrow we are going there to unpack the newspapers that are a bit wet and shouldn’t be stored in polyethylene bags.  The readers’ catalogue is being transported to Lyubertsy, too; it has almost not suffered from the fire or water.  The service catalogue is to be dried, but it’s still inaccessible because of breaking-downs inside the building.  Wet books are being transported to a cold storage facility in Kotelniki near Lyubertsy.  Books are rather heavy in such a condition, so only professional porters strong enough are involved in this work.  Unfortunately that’s why, at least till now, wet books have been taken off the building much more slowly than the dry books have, although it would be better if it were just the opposite.  In February the non-heated building worked itself as a kind of improvised cold storage, but it’s getting warm now; for wet books, that is really dangerous…