Libraries of the Committees of Care for People’s Sobriety as a Special Kind of Public Libraries in the Late 19th – Early 20th Century

Abstract

This article deals with the libraries and reading rooms of the Committees of care for people’s sobriety. There are some studies of this issue in the history of the library science in Ukraine but it is necessary to continue studying it both at the national level and at the regional level. The purpose of the article is to study the library activities of these Committees on the territory of the Kharkov province at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This article is the first attempt to study this aspect of research. The conclusions of the study are based on a system-historical approach, historical method and the analysis of documents published in the period of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. These publications represent the base of sources for the study. The author concludes that the libraries of the Committees should be considered as a special kind of popular book collections for anti alcohol propaganda.