Reorganization of the National Network of Mass Libraries: From the History of the State Library Policy of the 20th Century

Abstract

The centralization of libraries in the works of domestic experts has received an ambiguous assessment. The experience of the zemstvo system, the development of network construction by mass libraries were negatively interpreted for ideological reasons. A negative assessment of the work on the creation of a unified library network in the pre-war period prevented its development. It took decades for the party-state leadership to revise the criticism of the idea of centralization. During the second half of the 20th century, the centralization of library management structures was supplemented by technologies of interlibrary interaction. The introduction by mass libraries of standards for the bibliographic description of documents, the systematization of funds based on domestic tables of library and bibliographic classification allowed to join the work of interlibrary subscription, depository storage of funds.