The Library of KhAO

The library of the astronomical observatory of Kharkov national state university and observatory had founded simultaneously. The observatory begans to acquire magazins and books since the second half of XIX centure, but as the department of observatory the library was legalised in 50s years. Now two women works as librarians: T. N.Mandrika, the Head librarian, and R.D.Ivanchenko, assistant.

There are about 50 000 different copies: about 8500 russian and soviet books; about 1500 books in English, German, French; soviet and foreign periodical publications, serials and preprints of soviet and foreign observatories. We have not rare ancient copies, but there are rather old issues, for example: Bode J.C.,Von den neue endecten Planeten, 1784; Euler L., Einleitung in die Analyses, 1788; Anales de l'observatoire de Kiev, 1879; Harvard Annals, 1890; Washburn Publications, 1896 etc.

Our observatory was not an independent institution in the network of soviet academy observatories. It depend on the university budget...Use of the foreign currency was limited and was severe controlled, so that only the central universities and academy institutions might acquire the copies from "capitalist" countries. We might buy soviet books and subscribe only periodical publications of USSR and socialist countries and only astronomical issues. We have some foreign periodicals, which publicated before revolution in 1917. Then some of them were illegally reprinted in USSR until 1973, it were The Astrophysical Journal, Journal of Geophysics Research etc. In 1973 USSR had joined to Convention of Defence of Author Wrights and we lacked of this information sources.

During all this time we receive the most of foreign literature by the International Book Change. At the beginning we could send our publications in exchange. The observatory had own publishing from 1893 til 1985, then all the ukrainian observatories began to publish "Kinematics and physics of Celestial Bodies" instead of different series of observatories. We tried to send copies of this magazines but after 1989 it became impossible becouse of the deepest economic crisis.

Now during last seven years we cannot buy any books and we prefer to contact by e-mail becouse permanent lack of currency. Sometimes we cannot even sent the letter to Russia before extremally limitted university budget. And now only gifts and International Book Change are the single source of literature. Inspite of the past years just the Russian publications are not much accesible becouse of financial impossibility of subscriptions. We thanks greatly our unknown colleagues, who sed us the publications. Especially we thanks Heidelberg Astronomische Rechen- Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts and US Naval Observatory for The Astronomical Almanac. This copies are single in Kharkov.

Since 1998 our library is computerised. We have an old IBM-286 with winchester 40 Mb, it work only in DOS, but we can use DB3PL and create dbf-files. Now we create base of current information and we intend to make computer catalog of all the publications of our library.

The Head librarian T.N.Mandrika.