Jurgita Budziute, a librarian from Vilnius, Lithuania, is the thirteenth SEEC Library Fellow hosted by the Slavic and East European Collections, and the sixth funded by a generous gift of Dr. Kristaps Keggi, a Yale alumnus and orthopedic surgeon with family roots in the Baltic countries.

Ms. Budziute holds a bachelor’s degree in Library and Information Science and a master’s degree in Library and Information Centers Management, both from Vilnius University. She is currently Information Manager and Bibliographer in  the Department of Electronic Information, Martynas Mazvydas National Library of Lithuania, in Vilnius, where her responsibilities include information management, collection development, and the provision of electronic services. She is particularly interested is public relations within the libraries, and her goal is to work towards a Ph. D. in information sciences.

Explaining U.S. academic and research libraries during a presentation at Vilnius University Library, March 2006.

At Yale, Ms. Budziute worked in the Slavic Reading Room, where she received MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) training and in turn assisted the Curator, Tatjana Lorković, and her staff with the acquisition and cataloging of bibliographic materials from Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Belarus. As part of her fellowship, Ms. Budziute made a number of trips to other major research libraries in the area, including the New York Public Library, Harvard University Library, and the Library of Congress, spending a couple of days in each institution and learning about their collections, resources, services, and programs. Ms. Budziute’s experiences at Yale and in the United States provided the material for an extensive report, a number of presentations she made at institutions back home (most notably the Vilnius University Library), and an article in the March issue of Tarp Knigu, a professional library journal published by the Martynas Mazvydas National Library.