University Times

Pitt’s University Library System (ULS) will receive the European Union depository collection — the most extensive collection of public European Community/European Union (EU) documents and publications in North America — from the Delegation of the European Commission to the USA in Washington, D.C.

The collection will be available intact to patrons of Pitt’s Hillman Library. ULS also will digitize a large portion of the collection and upload it onto the Internet as part of Pitt’s Archive of European Integration (AEI).

The delegation, which established the collection soon after the formation of the European Coal and Steel and Community (1951), now known as the European Union, recently decided to divest itself of this library and selected Pitt’s bid for the collection.

“The addition of this unique collection marks yet another notable milestone in our long-term commitment to the University’s European Union Center of Excellence and the European Studies Center,” said Pitt University Librarian Rush G. Miller, director of ULS. “It also continues our mission to aggressively acquire European Union documents and make them available to researchers and the public. Our plan to digitize a large number of the collection’s documents for our Archive of European Integration will make them available to anyone in the world.”

The EU depository collection contains a complete set of the publications of EU institutions and agencies, as well as partial collections of relevant private commercial publishers, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Council of Europe and European trade associations. Nearly all documents in the collection published since 1973 are in English; most earlier documents are in French.

Pitt’s AEI is an online archive and repository that collects and uploads two types of materials on the topic of European integration: independently produced research materials, including working or policy papers and conference papers, and official EU government documents not available in electronic format on EU databases.