Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum
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| Established | 15 April 1971 |
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| Location | North Finchley |
| Access and use | |
| Circulation | Library does not publicly circulate |
| Population served | researchers, Belarusian community and anyone interested in Belarus |
| Other information | |
| Director | governed by the Board of Trustees |
| Staff | supported by volunteers |
| Website | [1] |
Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum in London, England, is the only library outside Belarus to collect exclusively in the field of Belarusian studies and its collection is the most comprehensive in this field in Western Europe. The library is an independent institution owned by a charitable trust. It is located at 37 Holden Road, North Finchley, London. The library is named after Francysk Skaryna, a Belarusian and East-Slavonic publishing pioneer.
Currently, the book collection is estimated to contain over 30,000 volumes, among them over 20 printed before 1800. The strongest areas of the collection are history, literature, language, religion, folklore, local lore, bibliography, music and art. All standard reference works are available. A collection of expatriate publications, both books and periodicals, is fairly comprehensive. New publications from Belarus are being purchased regularly, as well as all important Belarus-related works appearing abroad in any language. Most of books are in Belarusian language, a fair number in Russian and Polish, fewer in German, French and other languages. The library receives over 40 current periodicals from Belarus and abroad. The serials collection has over 200 titles; some of them are rare pre-1939 publications. The cartographic collection consists of over 100 maps from the sixteenth century onwards. The collection of Belarusian music records on LPs is comprehensive; more recent records on cassettes and CDs are collected episodically, with the emphasis on folk, rock and classical music. The archive is extensive; it is the least studied area of the library collection. It contains Church documents of the 18 and 19th centuries, materials dating from the period of the Belarusian Democratic Republic (1918), archives of Belarusian organisations and personalities in exile.
The history of the Library collection began with the establishment of the Belarusian Catholic Mission in London in 1947 and its move to Marian House on Holden Avenue in the following year. There, a small (two to three hundred) but valuable collection of Belarusian books brought to England by Fr Česlaus Sipovič was housed in the southward-facing room on the first floor, immediately above the Mission's chapel. The Library served as a study centre and meeting place for the student associations Žyćcio and Ruń, and was used by a number of scholars interested in Belarusian heritage.
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