The National Library of the Czech Republic: The Formation of Collections and Public Services

The predecessors of the National Library of the Czech Republic cannot be reduced to a single year. The Jesuit collection at Prague’s Clementinum had been accumulating since the sixteenth century, chiefly through gifts and bequests. In 1622, when Prague’s two universities were first united, Charles University’s books were transferred for Jesuit use. That year marks the takeover of a university collection, not the foundation of a modern national library.

When the two universities separated in 1638, the original books were not returned to Charles University, which established another library serving law and medicine. The later public library thus brought together several collections that had undergone separation, rebuilding, and reunion, rather than inheriting one unchanged continuous collection.

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The suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 created the political conditions for reorganizing their books. Maria Theresa’s court decree of February 6, 1777, incorporated the Clementinum and New Carolinum libraries, among other collections, into a state-directed public university library. It formally opened on October 30 that year. Remaining in Prague’s Clementinum complex, it inherited both books and existing spaces for their storage.

Count Kinsky participated in early administration and helped bring private and family collections into the library. Such accessions require distinctions of ownership: Hanslik records that the large family library remained family property and had to be kept separately, properly preserved, and neither sold nor exchanged. Public use did not automatically mean that every collection became state property.

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The library history records an initial capital fund of 8,100 florins, assembled from the funds of former Jesuit libraries and including an additional 200 florins from Kinsky. Annual interest was approximately 384 florins. Sales of duplicates after the merger supplied additional income, but transport, expansion, office costs, and most staff salaries also consumed funds, making advances from the university necessary.

These figures represent capital, income, and expenditure respectively and cannot be added together as a “founding budget.” In 1781, staff salaries were transferred to the Jesuit fund, with separate fixed allowances for office expenses and necessary repairs. In 1782, the court also supported implementing an annual university allocation of 300 florins, giving priority to purchases in law and medicine. Stable service depended on linking the receipt of collections to continuing financial arrangements. Restrictions on the appropriation’s use also reflected university participation: while serving scholarship generally, the combined library still had to meet the former law and medical teaching collections’ need for new books.

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The public library initially served chiefly university teachers, students, and a limited body of scholars. Its public character remained bounded by eighteenth-century social conditions. Its immediate task was to organize scholarly literature and make it retrievable and readable, rather than to organize an entire staff around a single question as an experimental research institute might.

Following Kinsky and Věžník, Karel Rafael Ungar took charge in October 1780. He brought experience of university teaching and management of a religious order’s library. Faced with large quantities of books arriving from dissolved monasteries, the challenges extended beyond adding shelves to identifying editions, establishing order, expanding reading space, and training staff capable of handling the materials.

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Classification under Ungar offers a concrete example of collaboration. Transport and receipt of books from different monasteries were disorganized, and some went missing along the way. Librarians first had to identify what had actually arrived, then follow Rautenstrauch’s guidance from Vienna to arrange it by subject into fifty-four divisions, bringing collections of diverse origin into a shared retrieval and shelving system.

Ungar also assembled works relating to Bohemia and Moravia in a special collection called Bibliotheca Nationalis. It included works in any language by locally born authors, alongside those of foreign-born authors who lived in Bohemia or wrote in Czech. Collecting and cataloging approximately 2,000 early printed Czech books gave the study of local culture a concrete basis in acquisition and bibliography.

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Ungar required his subordinates to know languages, bibliography, and library practice and valued legible handwritten records. He organized Saturday discussions in which staff jointly addressed current bibliographical and administrative problems. Before established professional library schools existed, this on-the-job learning embedded the transmission of experience in everyday work. Classification rules came from Vienna, but selection and organization took place in Prague, while the local special collection connected general procedures with regional scholarly needs.

The library’s formation therefore involved several levels. In 1622 university books were transferred; in 1777 a public university library was instituted and opened; subsequent classification, catalogs, and staff training made those resources continuously usable. Its scholarly contribution lay both in preserving old books and in enabling materials of dispersed origin to be organized together and consulted by new researchers.

References: [1] [3]