Historical department in Imperial Public Library

By the end of the 18th century in Russia the historical prerequisites for the creation of a national library were formed. The transfer of the Zaluski library to Saint Petersburg, the beginning of the construction of the first special building in Russia for the placement of library collections, made it possible to speak about the fact of the development in the national culture that had been unprecedented until then - the creation of the national library. Even with the initial analysis of collections in a special class, books on history were singled out, and the formation of the future Historical Department began. With the arrival in 1808 in the Library of A. N. Olenin, the principle of parsing and describing the collections obtained is changing. The decision to separate publications in accordance with the sectoral principle concerned only books and periodicals in foreign European languages. Despite the accepted sectoral delimitation of funds based on Olenin’s system of classification, the activities of the officials of the Library were not strictly assigned to a particular department. By 1847, the Historical Department had completed work on the merger of various parts of the collections, and the cataloging began. The administrative independence of the departments established by M. A. Korf’s order and the imposition of complete responsibility for each librarian for the department belonging to him fundamentally changed the structural organization of the Library. The creation of departments in the Library attracted specialists of relevant branches of knowledge to the service, among them there were many outstanding scientists. The article for the first time recreates the full history of this department, which played an important role in the service of readers and the development of the Russian methods of compiling catalogs.