41

Mainly based on the own archives of the BDIC, this article focuses on the story of the “Slavic service” of the Library, from the 1920s to the 1990s. How to gather information in a rush, responding to internationally important events? How to find well-qualified librarians, how to work with a system seeking to become the center of a new political culture, which therefore interested the most important Libraries in Europe and in the United-States? Is it possible to show -and if so, when?-the deliberate building of a “counter-memory”, counterbalancing the official memory of European communism? These questions help widen the questioning about the nature of the BDIC’s collections throughout the XXth century -books, leaflets, posters, but also written and oral archives.