Estonian national librarian helps catalog Wingate’s Baltic collection

By Kevin Perla Martinez

Student writer

In the spring of 2023, Wingate University established a Baltic Studies Reading Room in the Ethel K. Smith Library with a little over 1,400 volumes of works from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Since then, the collection has grown significantly, to an estimated 7,500 items.

Political science professor Joseph Ellis, who has done extensive research on Estonia and other Baltic states and was instrumental in establishing the collection, needed some help. He got it in the form of Kalju Tammaru.

Tammaru, a historian and national librarian from Estonia, visited Wingate last week to help organize the Baltic Studies Reading Room collection.

"The collection is surprisingly good, because it's so new," Tammaru said. "They have been successful to collect a quite nice collection of books and have huge plans to become a big and very important collection."

During his five days at Wingate, he helped to mark Estonian books in the collection with color-coded stickers and identified books that were rare or unusual in nature. He also identified missing elements of the collection. Tammaru mentioned that he hopes to send new books to add to the collection.

Tammaru's visit to Wingate demonstrates the importance of creating such a collection in the South.

"When I was a graduate student, there were few places in the South to research Baltic Studies, so I would have to travel to Illinois or other libraries in the Northeast or Midwest to do research." said Dr. Joseph Ellis, professor of political science, who has done extensive research on Estonia and other Baltic states.

Wingate's collection is now the largest special collection devoted to Baltic materials in the South and one of the largest in the country. The other large collections can be found at the New York Public Library, Stanford University, the University of Washington, the University of Illinois and the University of Toronto.

Ellis emphasized that it's important for the Baltic Studies collection to be accessible not only to Baltic researchers in the region but also to students.

"We not only have books but newspapers, personal letters, vinyl records and a whole host of materials that would make for a great research project in a world where everything is increasingly digital," Ellis said. "It is important to have tactile experiences and spaces like this still."

The collection creates a space for researchers and students to dive deeply into Baltic subjects, or just to be a place to study or to look around for curiosity. The University has held several events in the Baltic Studies Reading Room, and Kory Paulus, collection management librarian, has used the collection as a training ground for her students. They learn to catalog books in other languages, repair books and place them on the shelves, and they get a crash course in library sciences.

The Baltic Studies Reading Room has received several grants to support the collection, and a few local groups are interested in it. Ellis said that because of the growing population of the Lithuanian community in Charlotte, the Political Science department hosted a workshop in 2023, and thanks to Tammaru's work, the University is closer to opening the room fully to the public and other researchers."

Tammaru said that collections such as Wingate's are extremely important in the digital age. "We librarians are thinking it's not easy to replace one source of information," he said. "Collections like this one are small in the beginning, and they grow."

Wingate received a grant from the Estonian American National Council to bring Tammaru to campus. "We have several thousand Estonian-language texts, and he was recommended as an expert librarian at the National Library of Estonia," Ellis said. Tammaru helped to make sense of the collection and made recommendations for improving it.

Once the Latvian collection is cataloged, the Baltic Studies Collection room will open to the public.

Sept. 19, 2025