Museums of Russia: State Museum of the History of Religion’s scientific library re-opened in St. Petersburg

The Scientific library of the St. Petersburg State Museum of the History of Religion has resumed its work after a 3-year closure.

Since 2007 the library had been closed due to inventory of its holdings. Its staff made an enormous effort to systematize, record and organize the work of the lending library. These effort saw opening of repositories of Russian and foreign monographs and periodicals, booklets, and literature in the Church Slavonic language.

The library keeps a unique collection of diocesan records of many governorates of Tsarist Russia covering more than 12 500 items, which have been stitched and bound.

The scientific library of the Museum of the History of Religion is one of the major world repositories specializing in issues of religion and atheism. This is the only one secular library in Russia which holds so much literature on religions - Christianity (Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism), Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Shintoism. The library’s collection also features books on history, philosophy, psychology, archaeology, ethnography, visual arts, and museology. Holdings of the library number 192 000 units of storage.