The Barbara Sloane European Union Delegation Collection

 

The Barbara Sloan European Union Delegation Collection (BSEUDC) is a virtually complete collection of all official publications and documents produced by the European Economic Community/ European Community/ European Union from the early 1950s to 2004, the only of its kind outside of Europe.

The EU Delegation Collection was donated to the University Library System (ULS), University of Pittsburgh, by the Delegation of the European Commission to the US, Washington, DC in 2007.  In 2014, it was named in honor of former archivist, Barbara Sloan, in recognition of her work on the collection. The most complete EU depository library in North America has always been at the Delegation library as it received a complete collection of public European Union official documents and publications from 1952 to 2007, including many items not received by the 56 other depository libraries in the US.  A free and public Finding Aid, which is organized by subject, is now available for scholars as a reference.
 

Nature of the Collection

This collection includes over 16,000,000 pages, and is comprised of three main physical segments:

  • the “main” collection with a paper copy of most official publications;
  • microfiche collections of several series, some of which duplicate paper documents;
  • “research files”: these are folders of EU documents, such as COM and SEC documents, European Parliament reports, Council of Ministers and European Commission press releases, individual pieces of legislation, speeches by officials, etc. filed according to subject. The files also include clippings from non-EU publications like Agence Europe, European Reports, and European and U.S. newspapers. As a result of these files, patrons have access to nearly complete collections of these documents running from when the Community began publishing them until the late 1990s.

Some important points about this collection:

  • nearly all documents in the collection published since 1973 are in English; many earlier documents are in French, with a few in other languages.

For more information about the Barbara Sloan EU Delegation Collection or the documents found in the Collection, please see EUSA Review, volume 21, No. 1, Winter 2008, here.  To use the EU Delegation Collection, please contact bibliographer, Dan Pennell.