International Associate, September 26 - December 18, 2006

A senior research associate at the Music and Art Public Library in Vilnius, Lithuania, Egle Stalnioniene spent the fall semester 2006 as International Associate at the Yale University Library, with an appointment split between the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library and the Arts Library.

Egle started her career at the Vilnius Music and Art Public Library after earning a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Vilnius, founded in 1579 and one of the oldest and most renown establishments of higher education in Eastern Europe.

With Music Library Director Ken Crilly

The Music and Art Public Library—the only specialized public library in Vilnius—offers aesthetics classes for primary school students and has a dedicated center where young people can improve their skills, attend art lectures, and organize concerts and exhibitions. In her position, Egle regularly participates in various projects related to these fields of activity.

In 1999, the Vilnius Music and Art Public Library joined the International Association of Music Libraries Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), which counts more than 2,000 individual and institutional members in some 45 countries throughout the world. Egle is an individual member of IAML and the secretary of its Public Libraries Branch in Lithuania.

It was at the 2002 IAML Annual Conference in Berkeley, California, that Egle met and forged a fruitful professional relationship with Ken Crilly, Director of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, thus sowing the seeds that would eventually germinate in her Yale fellowship.

Her duties at the Yale Library include placing orders for art and music books published in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; arranging bookplates in the Arts of the Books Collection; and advising colleagues on Lithuanian newspapers and other periodicals.

Her impressions of Yale are dominated by the richness and the high quality of the cultural life on campus, the impressive and constant offering of first-rate concerts, lectures, seminars, exhibitions, and book presentations. Not to mention the availability of libraries that are rich, open, comfortable, and staffed with professionals who are experts in their fields.

Egle stressed the importance of fellowships or internships such as the International Associates Program, which give professionals from new democracies the double opportunity to improve their skills and knowledge of the United States educational system, and to understand and take advantage of the cultural differences between their home and host countries.

In her spare time, Egle collects bookmarks and bookplates. She also indulges in literature, cinema, theater, travel, and photography. The latter hobby, prompted by her recent visit to the United States, gave her the idea for a photo exhibition which she hopes to organize upon her return. The title? “The Smiling Paradise.”