book collections
Recently Published Documents

Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels are not typical “books about books”. However, both The Witcher cycle and The Hussite Trilogy abound in themes associated with them. The characters read, own book collections, they themselves are authors of various works. From the titles listed in individual texts, one could compile quite an extensive bibliography. This fact encourages a description of the way various texts exist in the world presented by the creator of The Witcher. Education of a young protagonist is a good opportunity to present books one reads, and the use of this readings in further life. Contrary to what the reader would expect, the book collections he learns about do not belong to universities. As for the library in Oxenfurt, we only know its roof, which is used by poet Jaskier, wanting to free himself from the spies following him. The scholarly books can be found in various places, even in a hut in a remote area (behind a curtain of dubious purity), inhabited by the scholar in exile — Vysogota from Corvo. Not only universities and scholars (including wizards) have impressive book collections. Duchess Anarietta, who hosts the witcher and his team, has a huge library in her palace in Toussaint. The subject of banned books appears in The Hussite Trilogy, so the hidden library motif is the obvious motive. Some protagonists of The Witcher cycle are authors of books. It is worth emphasizing that the reader has the opportunity to learn at least fragments of the mentioned works. They are also read by other characters. Quotes from the characters’ works also appear in mottoes.

The purpose of the article is an attempt to discover and analyze the activity of J. А. Zalewski (1894–?) аs director of the Central Polish State Library in Kiev in 1925–1931, on the background of the development of the main components of its functioning, to characterize the main achievements of his personal contribution as a director of the library in connection with the formation of the book collection as one of the leading library institutions in the city. In his scientific work the author has widely used historical-comparative, historical-genetic, statistical, chronological, biographical methods of research, the method of diachronic analysis, etc. The article analyzes the main socio-cultural factors of the development of the Central Polish State Library in Kiev, the dynamics of the main library components of its work and the main directions and achievements of book collections under the direction of J. А. Zalevsky during the specified period. Against the background of the characteristics of J. А. Zalevsky’s activity as a library director, the growth of book collections, composition and range of library readers, their reading interests, as well as the dynamics of the main library activity indicators of book collections under the direction of J. А. Zalevsky were investigated. The main directions of the work of J. А. Zalevsky as director of book collections and the sphere of the most important tasks of the library during the studied period are identified and characterized. The importance of activity of J. А. Zalevsky as a director of the library through the prism of the main tendencies of its development is analyzed. It was found that the sustainable development and successful activity of the Central Polish State Library in Kiev under of the direction J. А. Zalewski in 1925–1931 were limited by the shortcomings of the material and technical base, lack of funds, lack of systematic acquisition of books in Polish language, insufficient the number of publications published in Polish on the territory of the country, as well as political and socio-cultural factors of the country’s social life in the conditions of strengthening of the state totalitarian regime of the party bureaucracy and the curtailment of gender roots of rooting, ”which began at the turn of the 1920s‑1930s. However, thanks to J. Zalewski’s leadership, despite all the obstacles and objective difficulties, the work of the Central Polish State Library in Kyiv during the second half of the 1920s evolved steadily. Slowly, the bookstore was transformed into a cultural, educational, scientific and organizational-methodical center, which provided not only ordinary readers but also many experts who studied the history and culture of the Polish and Ukrainian peoples with the necessary information sources and bibliographic materials. Under the guidance of J. Zalewski of the Central Polish State Library in Kiev actively carried out cultural-educational,cultural-mass, educational and scientific-bibliographic work, in particular in book collections organized classes with graduate students, held certain measures to improve the skills of library staff of Polish libraries, organized exhibitions, lectures, creative evenings, exchange of library experience and more. Under the pretext of J. Zalewski, employees of the Central Polish State Library in Kiev carried out extensive organizational and methodological work; created Polish mobile libraries serving the Polish population in remote regions of the country; helped to organize new Polish departments at district book collections in many cities of Ukraine. It was at the turn of the 1920s‑1930s, when the institution was headed by J. Zalewski, that the greatest growth rate of development of the Central Polish State Library in Kiev was observed, when a certain network of Polish libraries, reading rooms and clubs was almost formed in the Ukrainian SSR.

Abstract Copies of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt (Proofs of Good Deeds) by the Moroccan Sufi saint Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Jazūlī (d. 870/1465) were in high demand in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. This required producing manuscripts in large numbers and, later, printing the text. These mostly lithographic copies and corpora of the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, when combined with references to biographical dictionaries, inheritance records, inventories, library catalogues, and endowment deeds, reveal a great deal of information about the public and private prevalence of the text, within and beyond the empire. The Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt appealed to many individuals, from Ottoman sultans to royal women, and from madrasa students to members of the learned class. Its copies were endowed to mosques and libraries, held in different book collections of the Topkapi palace, and were available from booksellers. Be it silently or aloud, the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt could be read in private homes and in mosques from Istanbul to Medina, a feature of pious soundscapes across the empire.

Introduction. Currently, the office limits access to collections of rare books for users to preserve the physical collection. Users who want to access the display will only get a synopsis. However, this policy makes users challenging to access the full-text content. The collection of rare books has also not received proper preservation and creates some rare book collections to be damaged. This study aims to determine the process of digitizing the rare book collections at the Archives and Library Office of Banjarnegara Regency based on Flipbook.Methodology. This study is a qualitative descriptive study. The selection of informants in this study is a purposive sampling technique. The data collection in this study is observation, interview, and literature study.Result and discussion. This study shows that digitizing the rare book collections includes selection, scanning, editing, flipbook making, and uploading on the OPAC INLISLite application 3.1. Users can access rare book collections in the form of flipbooks or interesting digital books. The obstacles found in digitizing rare book collections are the absence of SOPs of digitizing, inadequate digitization facilities and infrastructures, the absence of Human Resources (HR). Nevertheless, they master the digitization of collections and the lack of budget allocations for digitizing the collection.Conclusion. The impact of digitization with Flipbook is that users have full access to a collection of rare books needed by users and become an alternative to the preservation and empowerment of libraries and users that are more attractive and safe.

Abstract How can visual texts, closed books, and painted images work together in Buddhist temples to reinforce one another and act upon viewers? The fourteenth-century murals at the Tibetan temple of Shalu integrate pictures with long passages of Tibetan texts and select inscriptions that explain the powers of seeing paintings. The murals combine and mix media—books, paintings, cloth—into expressive wholes that ultimately argue that walls are in fact much more than walls. The paintings find ways to make the temple's book collections more accessible. Here we find a public art effort that weaves together a compelling argument for why religious texts and religious art both “work” for and on their audiences. Shalu was a grandly expanded temple showing off its resources and its connections in a broader cosmopolitan sphere of production and exchange. Its walls were designed to weave media together, finding ways to celebrate and explain larger and newer corporate productions (book projects, larger monasteries). An intentional play of materiality (clay, cloth, book) emphasized by the inscriptions and performed in the pictorial compositions assists in the imaginative act of directly seeing deities, while also playing with the awareness that acts of imagination entail the play of just-like/seeing-as. Since neither clay nor cloth nor word on their own are adequate vessels for representing an enlightened being, here they collaborate with each other and with viewers in the imaginative act, promising that the deity, like the teachings, can be directly experienced.

Two theses are formulated by the paper’s authors. The first speaks of the mission of making culture products available to the public, which was precisely the one Count Raczyński followed at the moment of founding the Library in 1829, and of the validity of this mission in the operations of the museum branches of the Raczyński Library: the Literary Museum of Henryk Sienkiewicz (MLHS) and the Flat-Studio of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna (MPKI). The second thesis claims that the book collections of both institutions are very special: they contain exceptional books and their book collections as such can become the object of research for literary scholars and linguists. Furthermore, information on the creation of the Raczyński Library and on the foundation of its museum branches is provided. In their analyses the authors classify the book collections into three basic categories: donated items, books that stand out as for their appearance, works created by the institutions’ donors, and an additional category for MPKI: books serving as tools for writers. The most interesting items within each category have been distinguished and described.

It is known that the history of book collections of past centuries’ libraries, including military ones, is tragic: for many reasons, they are often either scattered or preserved in small fragments. Today, when libraries intensively work to digitize their holdings and search out historical book collections, it is very important to identify and attribute books from foreign, as well as from Russian military libraries.For the first time, the article describes the work carried out to identify publications of foreign (and partly Russian) military libraries from the rare books collection of the Library for Natural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The article considers the publications as a source of information about scientific knowledge (military libraries were aimed to acquaint their readers with the basics of military art and the latest achievements in military science). There is shown that the content of such libraries’ collections did not exclude thematic diversity, targeted to comprehensively form the officer’s personality: professional, moral and cultural. The article examines the books of the 18th—19th centuries from military libraries of Europe, currently stored in the Library for Natural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the book marks in them proving the publications’ belonging to specific military libraries. There is highlighted the importance of book marks for the attribution of collections (and libraries) that existed in the past, but turned out to be scattered. The results obtained show that the publications and book marks of military book collections are a strong and reliable source in studying the history of military affairs, military science, and the history of military libraries, and confirm the need for further serious work with the library’s rare book collection.

Abstract Since 1940, the Rotterdamsch Leeskabinet’s collection includes the library of the Rotterdam Van Rijckevorsel family. The library, with a size of 3,000 titles, was formed in the nineteenth century by three generations: the entrepreneurs Abram and Huibert and the scientist Elie van Rijckevorsel. The library is a unique example of a preserved library of a Rotterdam patrician family from the nineteenth century. This article examines the nature and composition of the library. It turns out not to be a collector’s library, but an organically grown, hybrid library, in which the professional practice, interests and social position of the family members are reflected. Functional books stood alongside rare antiquarian editions, and literature next to scientific works. Notable is the large number of books on geography, especially with regards to Dutch overseas trading areas. In order to determine whether this library is representative of book collections of Rotterdam’s elite families, more research is needed.

The article is devoted to the creation of the collection “Books of the Imperial House of Romanovs” in the National Electronic Library (NEB) within the framework of the project “Book Monuments”. The general approach to the designation of imperial and grand ducal collections is based on the analysis of presence of the books in the collections of the Russian State Library (RSL). To justify the decision, the author considers the history of private book collections that belonged to the Romanovs before 1917 and their fate after the revolution. The book collections of representatives of the family in historical and scientific literature are divided into imperial and grand ducal collections. After the revolution, the significant part of the libraries located in the residences of St. Petersburg and its suburbs were moved to the Winter Palace. Some collections remained in the owners’ palaces and were distributed and moved to different organizations. After the decision was made to allocate the books to different organizations, the significant part of them was sent first to the Rumyantsev Museum, and then to the V.I. Lenin State Library of the USSR (now the Russian State Library). After registration, the books were distributed between different parts of the holdings without taking into account the ownership of the previous owners; and at present, it is not possible to restore them as a single complex. Based on the study and analysis of the archival documents of the Russian State Library, which had covered the receipt and allocation of the books in quite a detail, it was decided to combine all the books into a single electronic collection, since only this decision will allow getting together the copies of imperial and grand ducal books on a single resource and making them available for general access and study. The NEB’s capabilities allow providing information to specialists in the humanities and a wide range of users.