Fifty years of scientific and technical libraries in the Soviet Union

Abstract

During the fifty years since the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution the technical libraries have shown in the Soviet Union an immense progress. V. I. Lenin personally contributed directives and several remarks to the preparation of decrees and instructions aimed at the development of the system of scientific and technical libraries.
V. I. Lenin, as the great theoretician of the socialist revolutionary movement, and the organiser of the Great October Socialist Revolution, was well aware of the enormous tasks the libraries have in the ideological and political education and in the raising of the cultural level of the masses. Both, as a research worker and as an author, he knew the importance of the retrieval, the dissemination and the study of speciel literature.
After the consolidation of the Soviet state - when the organization of the socialist economy and the industrialisation of the country were the most important tasks, - speciel libraries were established one after the other in industrial establishments, big construction sites, various institutes. The special libraries successfully supported research, development and production, and played a significant role in making new technologies widely known, in disseminating new knowledge to engineers and technicians, economists and other specialists, inventors, skilled workers and stakhanovists.
The large technical public libraries of the Soviet Union - with their immense holdings and great variety of library services, and the advanced bibliographical processing of their holdings - complete the picture of the unified network of the scientific and technical libraries incorporated into the national network of scientific and technical information. Based on the results of the past fifty years it can be safely stated that the special libraries will continue to support the building of Communism in the Soviet Union.