The Meeting of Frontiers web site of the Library of Congress has added a large portion of the Göttingen State and University Library’s (SUB) world-famous Asch Collection to its already extensive digital holdings. The creation of Georg Thomas von Asch (1729-1807), a German who studied medicine at Göttingen and then entered the Russian National Service, the collection is a comprehensive record of Russian expeditions to Siberia in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Launched in December 1999, Meeting of Frontiers is a bilingual, multimedia English-Russian digital library that tells the story of the American exploration and settlement of the West and the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian Far East. With the addition of the Asch and other collections, the site now includes over 330,000 digital images that are available for use in schools and libraries and by the general public. Meeting of Frontiers is the world’s largest bilingual collaborative library site.

The items from the Asch collection available for viewing on the Meeting of Frontiers web site include nearly 250 printed volumes and manuscripts. Also included are approximately 200 eighteenth-century hand-drawn or printed maps from Göttingen’s Russica and Itineraria collections. These items complement other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century books and maps from the collections of the Library of Congress and Russian libraries that are included in MoF.