Library of the Tiflis Infantry Junker School (1866—1910)

One of the factors ensuring the security of the country is a high level of officer training, which is greatly assisted by purposefully staffed and well-organised libraries of military educational institutions. The use of historical experience of their structure and functioning can be useful today when compiling collections, developing regulatory and legal documentation governing their work, and providing services to readers. Due to the lack of studies on the history of the founding and functioning of libraries at infantry junker schools, this article presents for the first time the history of the founding and organizing of the fundamental library at the Tiflis infantry junker school on the basis of pre-revolutionary sources. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the history of the library of this military school. The following methods were used in the preparation of the article: chronological, source and comparative analysis. In order to achieve the goal, a wide representative source base was collected, including the Code of Military Decrees, catalogues of books and rules of libraries of junker schools, instructions, memos, as well as other pre-revolutionary publications. Regulatory legal documents that determined the procedure of acquisition and work of the libraries of all junker schools, as well as documents developed specifically for the Tiflis school were identified and analysed. Among them are the rules of issuing books to officers, teachers and students from the library and the rules of using the Junkers’ Reading Room, as well as the catalogue of books of the school’s library for 1908. For the first time the list of educational clerks (inspectors of classes and their assistants) for 1869—1917 academic years, who according to the normative-legal documents were entrusted with the management of the fundamental library of the school, was compiled. The results show that the library of the Tiflis Infantry Junkers School was one of the best among similar libraries in terms of the number of books, book supply of juniors and special military literature, but inferior to them in terms of fiction. This study has broadened the understanding of the libraries of military schools and the history of military librarianship in general.