Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2019 number

The relevance of a subject is determined by huge importance of military libraries in training and upbringing of the Russian army officers, whose education level influences the military power, the country’s defense capability. The article expounds the main problems of creation of Officer Artillery School, its books’ acquisition and functioning; analyzes the regulatory framework of their activity for the first time in historiography. The paper objective is to characterize functioning of Officer Artillery School libraries. One of them was for students, another - for the officer corps. The author applies comparative, chronological, bibliographic, source study methods. The study provides better understanding of history of the artillery department libraries, and military library science of the Russian army in general. It shows the attitude of the Ministry of Defense to libraries of military schools, which can be characterized as understanding their importance for officers’ training, as well as active regulating their creation, acquisition and functioning. Based on “The instruction for officers of variable structure of the Officer Artillery School of firing” issued in 1909, 1910, 1912 the paper reveals features of using books and periodicals from the educational library by the changing staff of the school. Studying these libraries is difficult due to the fact that researchers can’t find their catalogs, neither printed, nor hand-written. The research results reveal some sources of library collections acquisition (free editions of the Ministry of Defense and Military and Topographical Department of the General Staff and purchasing books abroad), and a large number of publications on the artillery prepared by the school teachers and officials and sent to these libraries and other libraries of the Ministry of Defense according to their catalogs’ analysis.