John and Anne Zdunic Endowment at the University of Toronto
Recently there was an article in the University of Toronto’s Libraries Newsletter concerning an endowment established by John and Anne Zdunic. The Zdunic family’s generous gift of $150,000 will allow the library to build an internationally renowned collection of research material related to Croatia that will be used by students and scholars for generations to come.
John Zdunic had already made an important donation which helped to substantially increase the number of books acquired about Croatia, in Croatian and other languages. He also helped find people with Croatian collections who might be interested in donating their books and contributing to the creation of a first class Croatian collection in Canada. As a result, the U of T Library now stands with Harvard, University of Washington and University of Michigan, among the top four North American libraries acquiring Croatian materials.
This new donation creates an endowment, which will support the development of the Croatian collection on a permanent basis. The Library has already been able to subscribe to 22 new scholarly journals and current newspapers. Some are dailies that enable users to keep up to date with events in Croatia. In addition, a major historical collection in microfilm has been acquired. The Croatian collection is used by both graduate and undergradute students in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
