Cataloguing of the T. G. Masaryk Library

Thanks to the understanding and financial support of the management of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, it was possible to reconstruct a large depository on the premises of the The Institute of Rock Structure and Mechanics of the CAS for the needs of the Masaryk Institute and the Archives of the CAS and to move the T. G. Masaryk Library there in 2016 (the owner of the library collection is the T. G. Masaryk Institute, o. p. s., the administration and operation of the library is provided by the MIA CAS, v. v. i.). In November 2017, the extension of the building of the MIA CAS in Gabčíkova Street in Libeň was put into operation, where all the staff of the MIA CAS were moved from the building Na Florenci 3, including the library operation. The friendly step of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic became the first impulse to save the historically and research-valuable collection, which was subsequently joined by the state.

Despite repeated requests, it was not until the spring of 2017 that funds were obtained to support the project of making the T. G. Masaryk Library accessible. An exceptional subsidy from the Government of the Czech Republic, based on Government Resolution No. 353/2017, made it possible to systematically catalogue half of the extensive and extraordinary library of the first Czechoslovak president from September 2017 to August 2019, which required at least 40,000 volumes to be catalogued annually. At the time, the government also pledged to support the second and final phase of the project, planned for the next two years. However, the funding for the second part of the project was not approved by the new government and was therefore provided directly from the Czech Academy of Sciences' own resources.

During the cataloguing process, emphasis was placed on preserving the original division of the library (the subject classification was taken over into signatures) and on preserving the exceptional volumes with signatures of Masaryk's family, dedications of artistic personalities of the time and the numerous notebooks with which T. G. Masaryk used to accompany the books he himself read. The cataloguers have endeavoured to record all these exceptional finds and to make them searchable in the continuously updated catalogue. The main goal of the project was to publish (in the comprehensive catalogues of the Czech Republic and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic) and make available to researchers a unique and historically valuable library collection.

The catalogued library collections of the MIA CAS are presented for study in the research room on the basis of orders.