LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES

Attracting an average of seven thousand researchers every year from some forty different countries and nearly every state, the Hoover Library and Archives is an international treasure. The library, with more than 1.6 million volumes, and the archives, with more than fifty million documents, constitute one of the world's largest repositories (25 miles of shelving) of materials on political, economic, and social change in modern times.

The collections are open to the public and organized into seven areas: Africa, the Americas, East Asia, East-Central Europe, the Middle East, Russia/Commonwealth of Independent States, and Western Europe.

Since the founding of the Institution, collecting efforts have sought to document the greatest issues of our time: war, revolution, and peace. Today, prospects for a peaceful future depend largely on whether free institutions and values, given the chance, will take root in regions of the world where they have never before—or only briefly—existed.

To document this struggle, the Hoover Institution's collecting program focuses on the political and economic transitions occurring worldwide, but especially in former and evolving communist countries. Equally important is developing collections that shed light on the political and economic effects of cultural conflicts throughout the world.