in the old days, the libraries of the former Soviet states would only do trades for materials. I had a colleague who corresponded with a library in St. Petersbu

in the old days, the libraries of the former Soviet states would only do trades for materials. I had a colleague who corresponded with a library in St. Petersburg and would trade microfilms (!) of Talmud manuscripts to get ones that hadn't ever been seen in the west before. This was roughly '92 through about '99. Then when it opened up more, selling microfilm or high-res scans of old texts and manuscripts was a big source of hard currency for the libraries' operating budgets. I suspect the lack of open-sourcing is to preserve an important revenue stream for the archive which I suspect is, like all libraries everywhere, horribly underfunded. I'd be thrilled if they had an English / Hebrew language site that took donations. Could probably get a decent return on that small investment.