History of Librarianship, Library History, or Information History: A View from Russia

For more than seven decades, library history in Russia has been considered a Soviet branch of science known as the "history of librarianship," and it could only develop in one way--on the basis of Marxist dialectical and historical materialism--which meant a stark isolation from the world science community. Beginning in the 1990s, however, attempts to overcome such isolationism became more and more visible. It is also increasingly obvious that overcoming the former totalitarian influence is not simply a question of the short period of time. In any event, the apparently simple readopting of that branch of science under the title "library history" was not possible. In fact, during the 1990s both terms "library history" and "history of librarianship" were widely adopted and even a new one called "information history" was created. The current position of researchers in Russia requires one to develop not only descriptive library history but also analytical history to analyze the peculiarities of library history and the history of librarianship. Furthermore, researchers have had to familiarize themselves with new ideas and to speak to the relationship between descriptive and analytical history.