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Mechanisation of library and information work in Russia can be described as being at an advanced stage of experimentation. It was in the mid‐1960's that computers became available in the Soviet Union on a practical scale, and studies of their applications to library work were first undertaken by leading national libraries; The State Public Scientific Technological Library of the USSR, the V. I. Lenin State Library, and the all‐Union State Library of Foreign Literature. These studies have concentrated on three principal areas; mechanisation of library processes (‘housekeeping’), development of large automated information storage and retrieval systems, and mechanical systems for retrieving books from stacks. High priority has been assigned at all times to the creation of integrated systems within the framework of a national structure of libraries.