Library of the Lithuanian Institute of History
The library is a division of the Lithuanian Institute of History. The Library of the Institute of Lithuanian History has been accumulated since its establishment in 1941. It inherited a part of the library collections of the Lithuanian Scientific Society in Vilnius (1907–1940) and of the Antanas Smetona Institute of Lithuanian Studies that was closed in 1941. Repositories of the library contain over 371 000 documents: books, periodicals, serial and information publications, manuscripts, audio-visual documents, old and rare printed materials, cartographic publications, and CDs. The library of the Lithuanian Institute of History contains 270 physical items of publications published in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, six palaeotypes, which are considered to be of special historical interest among them.
The repositories of the library preserve and accumulate the main sources of Lithuanian history: a large part of the collection (26,739 physical items) particularly valuable for Sovietological research, which consists of a collection from the underground period of the Communist Party of Lithuania and publications issued by social-democratic organisations before 1917, an extensive collection of newspapers and magazines from the period of the Republic of Lithuania (1918–1940), and a number of particularly valuable and rare periodicals of the Lithuanian émigrés, some still in print. Between 2002 and 2012, the library repositories were supplemented by donations from Trinity College, Cambridge. Most of these publications are the only copies in Lithuanian libraries.
The manuscript library consists of archaeology and ethnology collections.
The archaeological collection contains reports, drawings, sketches, and negatives of archaeological expeditions. Archaeological reports have been collected since the post-war years. All archaeological material provides a comprehensive record of the archaeological excavations and is important for researchers.
The ethnological collection consists of 2364 files (descriptions, drawings, sketches) and over 90,000 negatives. This manuscript and iconographic material covers all ethnographic regions of Lithuania and all areas of ethnic culture. In addition, it contains the material from Lithuanian settlements in Belarus, Latvia and Poland, which is important for the Lithuanian national cultural heritage. It should be noted that the mass of this manuscript complex consists not only of the material collected by the ethnological expeditions of the Lithuanian Institute of History, but also of the documents of the Lithuanian Scientific Society and the Archive of Lithuanian Folklore (1935–1940).
Tilto g. 17, LT-01101 Vilnius
Tel.: (8 5) 262 68 59
Email: biblioteka@istorija.lt
