The UW is home to one of North America's leading university library collections supporting humanities and social science research about all three countries of the Baltic Region. The Library's greatest strength is in Latvian studies, followed by Lithuanian and then Estonian. Collection emphases include language and linguistics, folklore and ethnology, literature, art, cinema, history, and contemporary political, economic and social conditions.
The main impetus for the collection's rapid growth was the establishment in 1994 of UW's
Baltic Studies Program under joint auspices of UW's Ellison Center and Scandinavian Studies Department. UW's is the only program in North America that offers coursework leading toward a degree in each of the three languages and cultures of the Baltic Region.
In 1996 the Baltic Studies Program and UW Libraries jointly negotiated the transfer to UW of the entire collection of the Latvian Studies Center Library (Kalamazoo, Michigan), which for financial reasons was obliged to find a new home for its collection. This collection of some 12,000 books, periodical volumes, and microfilm reels is one of the outstanding Latvian collections in North America and, combined with our intensive acquisition of new materials, has helped transform the UW Libraries into a major national resource for Latvian studies.
More recently, in spring 2005, UW received a generous gift of more than 2,400
Lithuanian books, periodicals and other materials from the Lithuanian Research
and Studies Center in Chicago. These significant older publications
(1920s-1990s) have helped to fill in gaps in UW's retrospective collection.
Since about 1997 UW has also been acquiring most significant new
publications coming out of Lithuania.
The Estonian collection is strongest in language, linguistics, literature and
folklore, and features all of the many periodical and monograph series of
Estonia's distinguished Tartu University. There are also selective but
growing holdings in Estonian history and art.