'The Scientific Life of Libraries': Professional Formations and Practices in the 'Soviet Bibliography' Journal

• In Event: Provincializing Internationalism: Periodicals, Publishers and Practices IV: Mapping

Abstract

In 1933, the Russian Central Book Chamber published the first issue of its new journal “Soviet Bibliography” with an editorial mandate to report “the scientific life of libraries.” Founding editor V. I. Nevskii was writing as part of an ascendant second wave of Soviet librarians animated by designing a Marxist-Leninist classification scheme robust enough to facilitate the most geographically ambitious interlibrary loan network in history. The professional exchanges throughout “Soviet Bibliography” suggest that the debate over Marxist-Leninist classification was a mobilizing theoretical issue around which its insular writer-reader community cohered a kinship identity as library scientists distinct from proletarian library work. In the pages of “Soviet Bibliography”, this emergent class location articulated a new scientific vision of the library as an institution that demanded mental labor and technical credentials to operationalize bibliography as a technology capable of disseminating socialist literature internationally. Working from the first twenty years of “Soviet Bibliography”, this paper periodizes and analyzes two core developments in the “scientific life” of the early Soviet library: how professional formations around Marxist-Lenist classification schemes reoriented the normative practices of librarian labor; and the extent to which these professionals attempted to standardize pre-Thaw socialist internationalism within bibliographic practice itself.

Author

• Alexander Whelan, New York U