ACADEMIC LIBRARY

of the Siberian Technological Institute.

The Library counts 28 years of its history. From the moment of its foundation to the present time it has existed as an auxiliary institution attached first to the Tomsk, and then to the Siberian Technological Institute.

Until the end of 1920 the Library lived according to the charter of 1884, and only on November 30, 1920, at the proposal of the Collegium for the Administration of Higher Educational Institutions of November 30, 1920, the STI Library was placed under the charter approved by the Head of the People’s Commissariat for Education, M. N. Pokrovsky, on February 8, 1920. This charter to a considerable degree enlivened the activity of academic libraries, introducing into it new fruitful principles. The principal task of the new charter, in the view of its compilers, was the necessity: 1) to introduce unity and orderliness into the library work of higher educational institutions, 2) to raise the importance of special work in them, 3) to grant greater freedom and independence to the library staff in arranging and servicing the library in accordance with the requirements of rational library technique, 4) to increase the accessibility of academic libraries for all those engaged in science, without thereby infringing upon the teaching-and-academic interests of the higher educational institution.

This charter also provided for the financial autonomy of academic libraries, but owing to the fact that the People’s Commissariat for Education did not receive the necessary appropriations in due time, this idea was not realized, and in economic and financial respects the libraries continued to remain under the jurisdiction of the administrations of the higher educational institutions.

In order to coordinate the new charter with local conditions, the Library Commission of the STI, together with the Library Committee, drew up a provisional charter for the Library, which, with certain subsequent changes and additions, remained in force until the end of 1926, when, with reference to the model charter of scientific libraries at higher educational institutions, published in the Weekly Bulletin of the People’s Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR on October 21, 1926, a new charter was drawn up by the library bodies and approved by the Administration of the STI and by Glavprofobr; according to this charter the Library lives at the present time.

This charter, while preserving the basic principles of the charter of 1920, in administrative, economic, and financial respects legalizes the actually existing dependence of the Library on the Administration of the STI, but at the same time introduces a new principle, formulated in the first paragraph of the model charter as follows: “Libraries attached to higher educational institutions, performing the functions of teaching and teaching-auxiliary institutions attached to higher educational institutions, are included in the network of scientific libraries of the People’s Commissariat for Education on an equal basis with all other scientific libraries.”

For the initial equipment of the Library, 30,000 rubles were appropriated. The annual regular appropriation was set at the amount of 8,000 rubles. In addition, credits were granted from the Institute’s special funds for replenishing the teaching library for students. From ...

Of the book collections acquired, the most valuable contribution is the library of Engineer Kulibin, consisting of 2,173 titles in various disciplines.

By October 1, 1928, according to the inventory books, the Library held 75,659 volumes, and together with unregistered books and the duplicate collection, up to 94,333 volumes, not counting the libraries attached to departments and laboratories, which under the charter are considered branches of the Main Library. The duplicate collection consists chiefly of the Proceedings of the Tomsk (Siberian) Technological Institute for the entire period of their existence.

The chief wealth of the STI Library consists of books and journals in technical disciplines. In this respect it occupies first place among the libraries of Siberia and one of the leading places among the libraries of higher educational institutions of the USSR. Second place in number of titles is occupied by mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other disciplines belonging, under the international bibliographical classification, to the fifth division. There are also sections on economics, history, geography, and art, but their composition is accidental in character, and only in recent times has the Library been supplementing the section on economics and other social disciplines more systematically.

Among the books there is a fairly large number of publications on Siberian studies, but they are not set apart in a special section; there are publications of very great scholarly value or else rarely encountered. Thus, in the section of pure sciences there is the Leipzig edition of the complete works of the celebrated mathematician Leonard Euler, the Göttingen edition of the works of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Paris edition of the works of the celebrated astronomer Laplace and the physicist Arago, and the Brunswick edition of 1738 of a work important in the history of mining, entitled A Detailed Description of Ore Mining. In the section of geography and history it is necessary to note the following rare editions: Pallas’s Journey through Various Provinces of the Russian Empire, ed. 1773 (Russian) and 1776 (German); Krasheninnikov’s Description of Kamchatka, ed. 1755; German and Russian editions of the 18th-century travels through Siberia by Academicians Miller and Gmelin; the Paris edition of M. Coxe’s book New Discoveries of the Russians between Asia and America, with a History of the Conquest of Siberia and of Russo-Chinese Trade, ed. 1781, and others. For students, a special library has been set aside consisting of textbooks, reference books, atlases, albums, and the most frequently requested journals.

The Library is built up through the purchase of books and journals using credits from the People’s Commissariat of Education, foreign currency and special funds of the Institute; through exchange and the free receipt of publications; and, to a considerable degree, through accessions from the mandatory copy of Tomsk State University. Of the 5,852 volumes received in 1927–28, 4,773 came through the mandatory copy, exchange, and free receipt.

The Library conducts exchanges not only with universities and higher technical educational institutions of the USSR, but also with certain foreign higher educational institutions and learned societies, namely: the Vienna Academy of Sciences, the Neapolitan Academy of Physical and Chemical Sciences, the Padua Higher Engineering School, the Rhenish Geological and Mineralogical Society (in Brittany), the University of Pennsylvania, Ohio State University, the Chicago Technical School, the American Geological Society, Fa-

Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at La Plata, the Higher Technical School in Karlsruhe, and others.

In 1928 about 340 journal titles were received, of which 186 were foreign.

Books are classified according to the decimal system of the International Bibliographic Institute in Brussels.

There are five card catalogs: two alphabetical and three systematic. In addition, there are two book catalogs of Russian and foreign journals.

In arranging the books in the stacks, a system is used by which books are assigned to a definite bookcase.

In 1927–28, 126,693 operations were carried out in the lending department and in the reading room; of these, 61,166 were for the issue of books, 3,750 for unfilled subscribers’ requests, and 61,777 for the receipt of returned books. Of the 61,166 issues, 16,823 were for the reading room.

The Library staff consists of 13 persons: the head librarian, two department heads, one of whom is deputy head of the Library; one assistant librarian, five junior librarians, two book workers, and two attendants.

Each year the Library organizes exhibitions in order to reveal the composition of its stacks and thus make the fullest possible use of them in the interests of subscribers. In addition, every week throughout the year exhibitions are arranged of new items received by the Library during the week.

Since 1926 the Library has carried on bibliographic work, in which all librarians take part. This work is closely connected with subscribers’ requests for one kind of literature or another.

For the needs of the Library in 1927–28, 11,313 rubles were allocated, not including the maintenance of the library personnel.

Turning now to the dynamics of the Library’s development over the last 11 years, it should be noted that during this period it grew rapidly both with respect to the replenishment of its book holdings and with respect to satisfying the needs of subscribers.

The figures and diagrams given below clearly show how rapidly the number of annual book acquisitions grew: in 1917, 798 volumes were registered in the inventories; in 1921, 826; in 1922–23, 1,661; in 1924–25, 2,613; in 1926–27, 4,170; and in 1927–28, 5,852 volumes.

Thus the number of accessions in the eleventh year increased, in comparison with 1917, by more than seven times.

The total number of Library operations for issuing and receiving books in 1917 was 25,687; in 1927–28 it reached 126,693, i.e., it increased fivefold. Thus we see that the growth in the Library’s acquisitions exceeded the growth in the demands placed upon it, despite the enormous increase in the latter. From this one could already, a priori, conclude that the percentage of subscribers’ unsatisfied requests should have decreased. Statistical data confirm this a priori conclusion, namely: in 1917 the total demand for books was 14,320, and the number of unsatisfied requests was 1,708, i.e., it amounted to 12%; in 1927–28 the total number of requests was 64,916; of these, the number of unsatisfied requests was 3,750, i.e., about 6%.

Head of the Library, M. Slobodsky.