In October 1993 the Michael B. Petrovich Reading Room in Memorial Library
officially opened. The reading room is named in honor of Michael Boro Petrovich (1922-1989),
a distinguished professor of Balkan and Russian history known throughout the state as a
gifted teacher and for his creative outreach activities. The Petrovich Room collection concentrates
on basic reference works on the Slavic, East European, and Central Asian areas,
including bibliographies, serial indexes, library catalogues, archival guides,
statistical handbooks, census material, encyclopedias, and language dictionaries.
The 4,056-square-foot facility also contains English-language undergraduate-level
materials on Russia and Eastern Europe assembled from the late Professor
Petrovich's personal collection. The Petrovich collection in Room 212 of Memorial Library
has also been expanded by generous gifts of materials on Russian literature of
the 19th and 20th centuries from the personal libraries of Emeritus Prof. J. Thomas Shaw (1919-2011)
and Dr. James O. Bailey, Jr. (1929-2020).
Also, Special Collections holds a
collection of Soviet samizdat poetry collected by Dr. Bailey.
Numerous complete collected works of classical Russian writers, along with a comprehensive
collection of the series Biblioteka poeta, serve as backup reference copies to those
copies in the Memorial Library stacks which are allowed to circulate.
In addition to the Petrovich Room collection, the UW-Archives contains a
collection of materials donated to the library by Dr. Petrovich. This collection includes correspondence with organizations,
colleagues and students, lecture notes, writings, and manuscripts, and a large collection of audiovisual materials used by
Professor Petrovich throughout his teaching career.
Last modified: Dec. 28, 2023
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