In celebration of the Mongolian New Year, the Mongolia Society at Indiana University presented the IU Libraries with a gift of microfilmed newspapers that rivals any in the United States.

Only the Library of Congress and Harvard University include among their holdings Unen, the newspaper of record for Mongolia, among their WorldCat holdings. With this microfilmed edition, IU will have the most complete run of the newspaper outside of Mongolia, the landlocked country between China and Russia.

Unen, which means "truth," was the official newspaper of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party and the government of the Mongolian People's Republic. Published in Mongolian in the Cyrillic alphabet, the newspaper is similar to the Russian Pravda, known for promoting the party line.

"Even if the newspapers lied about reality," said Dr. György Kara, professor of Central Eurasian Studies at IU, "it's interesting to see how those lies changed over time." Kara notes that the newspaper was printed on poor-quality paper, and "if not filmed very soon, becomes ashes," referring to the rapid pace at which acidic papers become brittle and disintegrate.

The run includes newspapers from 1957 to 1990. Although several issues are missing from the microfilm set, representatives of the Mongolia Society are working with colleagues in Mongolia to fill in the gaps.

Cecile Jagodzinski, director of collection development for the IUB Libraries, likened the gift to a perfect diamond. "Sometimes the best gifts come in small packages, one item at a time," she said, accepting the gift. "It seems fitting, then, that this singular donation of Unen, the newspaper of record for the country of Mongolia, should come wrapped in those sturdy little boxes that store microfilm."

The Mongolia Society collected the newspapers and still houses the originals in six closets in IU's Goodbody Hall, where the society is headquartered. "I know the newspapers are strategically important, and I just wanted to preserve the material," said Susie Drost, who initiated the reformatting project on behalf of the society.

The microfilming project was funded by a grant from the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center, a center at Indiana University created in 1961 to support the university's program in Central Eurasian Studies.