In 2025, declared in our country according to the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin of January 16, 2025, no. 28 as the Year of the Defender of the Fatherland, the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War is celebrated. In this regard, it seems relevant to turn once again to the history of the Lenin State Library of the USSR (LSL, now the Russian State Library) and, in particular, to the consideration of its bibliographic activities in 1941—1945. All the work of the LSL was rebuilt on a war footing, the forces of bibliographers were directed to help the active army and workers on the home front. As a result of the analysis of wartime bibliographic aids prepared by the library, 75 editions issued from 1942 to 1945 were identified. The main groups of readers for whom the bibliographic aids were created were identified: combat commanders, agitators and propagandists, librarians, grassroots leadership promoted during the war. The leading type of bibliographic publications created by the State Library during the Great Patriotic War were bibliographic guides. They are brief annotated indexes and lists of literature. The distinctive features of wartime publications are their small volume, clear structure, short annotations, selection of the necessary minimum literature. The content and themes of the bibliographic publications under consideration are related to the training of soldiers of different military specialties and other pressing problems of wartime. The manuals are aimed at patriotic education, assistance in general and professional self-education, and solving economic issues.

Since the early 1990s, the network of municipal public libraries in Russia has been undergoing negative transformations: decentralization, loss of autonomy, and reduction in number, especially in the segment of rural libraries. They are being reorganized into separate libraries or subdivisions of cultural and leisure institutions of various formats: clubs, municipal cultural centers, multifunctional associations of socio-cultural institutions, etc. In this problematic situation, the role of central libraries (CL) of the subjects of the Russian Federation as actors of regional library policy is reconsidered from the point of view of further preservation of municipal libraries not only as separate institutions, but also as links of the unified network of the region for its subsequent overall phased modernization. Based on current management practices and the realities of municipal librarianship, the concept of a new functional-role model for optimizing the interaction between the Central Library of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation and public libraries of the region and their founders is presented. The model focuses on the triad of zones: responsibility, influence, agreement (compromise). A zone is understood as a part (area) of the CL’s activity with certain powers and intentions, which are established on the basis of the current federal and regional legal and regulatory acts in the field of librarianship, as well as the objectives of the CL’s practical activity in the field of development of library organisations. The extra zones depending on regional differences is determined independently by the Central Library.

The Decree of the President of the Russian Federation “On the National Development Goals of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2030 and in the Perspective up to 2036” sets the development goals of our country. The Annual Meeting of Heads of Federal and Central Regional Libraries of Russia, held in St. Petersburg on November 12—13, 2024, was dedicated to these tasks. The theme of the event was “Libraries and National Development Goals”. The participants of the meeting discussed the role of libraries in the implementation of strategic projects in the field of culture, integration of libraries of new subjects of the Russian Federation into the cultural environment of Russia and others. The transformation of the Russian Library Association (RLA) aimed at achieving the national development goals of our country. The priorities of the association are centralization of work at all levels, international activities, monitoring and research of the industry, strengthening of public relations, intensification of financing of the association’s projects, modernization of section management. At the meeting the issues of legal deposit were raised, projects in the sphere of preservation of the national library fund were presented. The problems of updating approaches to solving the problems of software import substitution, etc. were discussed. The participants paid much attention to the national goal of educating a patriotic and socially responsible personality in the context of celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941—1945.

Scientific and methodological activities are in the focus of attention of Russian library specialists. At professional events and in scientific and practical publications the issues of the influence of digital technologies on the content and tasks of methodological work, as well as the mastering of new knowledge and skills by methodologists are raised. The problems of ethics of interaction with the target audience in remote form, the content of virtual representations of methodological services and the quality of information presented in them are discussed. In 2024 specialists of the Russian State Library analyzed the official websites of 85 central regional libraries. The purpose of this work is to study the experience of scientific and methodological support in the electronic environment of the national project “Culture” in terms of creating model municipal libraries (federal project “Cultural Environment”). The study is the first characteristic of methodological resources created over the years of the project implementation and placed in the electronic environment, assessing their diversity, accessibility, informativeness, and practicality for use by specialists involved in the modernization of municipal libraries.

The study showed that all central regional libraries reflect their methodological participation in the project on their websites, but use different approaches. More than half of the libraries (66%) have created special methodological web-presentations, where information about the region’s participation in the project is concentrated. Other libraries (34%) publish this information in different structural elements of the site, mainly in sections where news, documents and methodological materials are presented. It was found that the number of libraries posting methodological resources on the subject of the national project is relatively low: official documents of federal and regional levels are presented on the websites of 53% of libraries, industrial and practical — 30% of libraries, educational and methodological and analytical materials in isolated cases. Shortcomings in the presentation of methodological resources in the electronic environment were revealed: lack of clear control over the relevance of the content, placement of visual material of low quality, poor filling of thematic sections, inaccuracies in the designation of resources, etc. Not all central regional libraries widely use the possibilities of the electronic environment for sharing experience and informing about their methodological activities. There is a need for further development of the content of the Internet representations of methodological services, as well as improvement of methodologists’ competences related to the ability to work with large data sets, to structure, systematize and visualize information, to determine the degree of its relevance.

Improving the quality of library services, based on the use of library collections of different typological and departmental affiliation, has been a task to be solved by the professional community for many decades. Mass digitization of collections and creation of electronic libraries allow to create unique information resources, the quality of which from the point of view of their content is the subject of modern librarianship research. The article explores the issues of formation of digital collections created as a result of planned digitization of traditional collections. The basic criteria for assessing their content — thematic completeness, type-species diversity, relevance (updatability) — are analyzed. It is noted that the rational completeness of the collection subject matter can be ensured through the use of the principle of selectivity, involvement of highly qualified experts at all stages of work on the formation of digital collections — from the selection of publications for digitization to permanent supervision. The need to create mechanisms for assessing the quality of digital collections, both on the basis of automated monitoring of the demand for resources and on the ground of feedback from users (surveys, questionnaires of the target audience) has been identified.

Currently, the sphere of education in Russia is undergoing numerous transformations. Transformations are taking place both at the federal level and at the level of individual institutions of higher education. The changes are aimed, among other things, at improving the quality of implementation of basic educational programmes, educational, research and other processes in higher education.

The use of quality management system (QMS) in the work of information and library centers (ILCs) or libraries of higher education institutions gives the following advantages: improvement of quality and timely provision of library and information resources; possibility to achieve the set goals, to optimize current business processes; improvement of feedback between all participants of educational relations; possibility of self-development and professional development; application of risk and controversy management methods suitable for the situation, etc. The management of the ILC of the Voronezh Institute of Economics and Law (VEPI) decided to use quality management in its work. To implement QMS we analyzed the parties interested in information and library support and their satisfaction with the services received. The interviewing was conducted, the results of which showed that the quality of services provided is the most popular request among the users of the VEPI ILCs. The respondents’ answers also include requests for a wide range of up-to-date information, educational and methodical literature in electronic library systems with which the university co-operates, etc. In order to consider this issue in more detail, the Questionnaire was developed to assess the organization and quality, as well as information and library support of the educational process of VEPI. A total of 64 people took part in the survey. Its results show that the organisation, quality and information and library support of the educational process at VEPI in general are at a high enough level and satisfy the majority of respondents. At the same time, the analysis makes it possible to draw up a plan of corrective measures that will contribute to the highest quality satisfaction of the requests of the parties interested in information and library support of the university.

The introduction of QMS in the work of the VEPI ILCs will allow to comprehensively take into account the needs and requests of users for information and library support of educational and other processes, as well as to improve the quality and efficiency of all areas of activity.

The article is devoted to the characterization of one of the personal collections preserved in the stock of the fundamental library of Perm State Humanitarian Pedagogical University (FL PSHPU) — the library of D.K. Bobylev. Dmitry Konstantinovich Bobylev (1842—1917) was a physicist, professor of mechanics at St. Petersburg University. His personal collection was acquired in 1917 for the library of the Perm branch of the Petrograd Imperial University. The article describes the history of the collection’s existence in Perm. The inventory of D.K. Bobylev’s library, which includes brief information about the received items, has been preserved in the archive of the FL PSHPU. It gives an idea of the type composition of the collection, which included reprints, convolutions, books and periodicals. There is no information about the number of copies received in the inventory, so the quantitative characteristic of the library is given in the article on the basis of the analysis of inventory books. It is noted that the collection was registered in parts, in the period from 1917 to 1918, 2601 copies of books and periodicals were registered. Some of the copies were accounted for many years after their arrival, and now their identification is possible only by the owner’s marks preserved on them. The article characterizes the content of D.K. Bobylev’s library, which reflects the owner’s interest in physical and mathematical sciences. The collection contains the works of many outstanding scientists who made a great contribution to the development of physical and mathematical sciences. The article tells about the most interesting copies identified to date in the collection of the FL PSHPU. There are preserved owner’s marks, as well as gift notes addressed to D.K. Bobylev on a significant part of the books and prints.

V.M. Motylevʼs 1985 article entitled “The Content and Correlation of the Concepts of ‘Indicator’ and ‘Criterion’” is considered as well as a number of his other published work close in time and content. It is shown that V.M. Motylevʼs interpretation and definition of these concepts in relation to the disciplines of socio-communication cycle and the so-called metric research, objectively remains today the best and more preferable ones to be used than the definitions of indicator and criterion in various dictionaries. V.M. Motylev gave the following definitions: “...an indicator is some measurable property of an object used to quantitatively characterize another property that is not directly measurable”; “...in quantitative research a criterion is an evaluative indicator, the value of which is perceived as a numerical expression of the qualitative ratio ‘better — worse’ when making managerial decisions. The larger (or smaller) the value of the criterion is, the better is considered to be the variant of the state or property of the object corresponding to it”. Thus he established that “the formation of a quantitative criterion comes down to selecting one of many indicators describing the properties of the object to be used in the evaluation mode”. The authorsʼ check of definitions and use of these terms in specialized and non-specialized dictionaries, as well as in domestic and foreign publications has shown that in most cases there is a complete disregard of V.M. Motylevʼs formulations, which facilitates to occurrence of confusion, and complete impossibility of comparing the results of different studies, for which, inter alia, the unification of scientific terminology serves. So far, studies positioning themselves as “metric” regularly limp because of confusion in the concepts of “measurement” and “quantitative research”, directly measured and indirectly assessed property of the object (or “indicator” and property under assessment), “indicator” and “criterion”. All this makes it difficult to conduct such research, although V.M. Motylev wrote 40 years ago that “quantitative analysis consists not in ... calculations, but in identifying relationships between phenomena, determining the form and closeness of these relationships, revealing trends and patterns”.

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