Librarianship in Buryatia During the Years of Perestroika (1985—1991)

Regional studies on the history of librarianship in the perestroika period contribute to the reconstruction of the overall picture of the library industry development in Russia at the turn of the epoch. Certain lacunas in the historiography and the controversial nature of the problem make it necessary to study it further in order to identify the regularities of the evolution of the library sector in a difficult historical period. The library sector of the Buryat ASSR, along with the existing traditions of the Soviet era, was searching for its niche in the changing society. Various problems were fixed: the shortage of certain types of publications, the decline in library attendance, the decreasing interest in reading among the younger generation. The introduction of new forms and methods of work, self-financing, paid services, and automation of library processes should have helped to solve the problems to a certain extent. In the Buryat ASSR, where the provision of library resources was quite favorable compared to some other regions of Siberia, there was, on the one hand, a slight increase in the number of state mass libraries and their collections, on the other hand, a reduction in the network and book wealth of the libraries of trade union, scientific and technical, and higher educational institutions. Negative dynamics of the main indicators of mass libraries’ activity appeared: the number of users, book delivery, and readability. At the end of the 1980s, the Buryat ASSR faced problems of financing and, as a consequence, of acquisition of funds, material, technical and personnel support of libraries. The orders of centralized library systems for literature were half fulfilled. The area of large libraries, the M. Gorky Republican Scientific Library and the Republican Children’s Library, was many times less than the normative one, dozens of state mass libraries were located in unsuitable premises. There were staff cuts in scientific-technical and trade union libraries, and insufficient staffing in some library institutions. During these years the intersystem book exchange in the state mass libraries continued; offices and bureaus of scientific and technical information worked; there was an experimental testing of interdepartmental book exchange, servicing of workers of the regional agro-industrial complex. The methods of literature promotion aimed at active communication with library users were increasingly used.