Personal Book Collections

Since 1989 the library has been storing private book collections left by the library’s friends and other renowned people of the region. To this date, there are 15 private libraries or their fragments. These libraries are stored in Department of Region’s Cultural Heritage Dissemination, Juozas Miltinis Memorial Apartment, Arts Reading Room, and Information Resource Management Department. The information that a book belongs to a private library is indicated in its bibliographical description, which you can find in an e-catalogue.

Manuscript Collections

Since 1991 the library has been storing a collection of :

• manuscript documents, related to Lithuania’s and Panevėžys region’s history, culture, science, and other important public events from the oldest times up to today;
• archival heritage of literary, art, science and other prominent figures – their manuscripts, personal and work documents, correspondence, photography, art objects and others.

Today the library boasts more than 20 000 such documents, which according to their origin are divided into 175 funds. The chronology of these documents spans from mid XVIII century to these days.

These 175 funds are held in a special storage room in the library’s Central building (Respublikos st. 14).

Juozas Miltinis Memorial Apartment (Algirdo st. 54–19) has two funds:

• theater director Juozas Miltinis’ fund, which was included in the National Lithuania’s register “Pasaulio atmintis” and announced of national significance;
• Panevėžys drama theater chronicler, actor, photographer Kazimieras Vitkus’ fund, which holds a big volume of iconographic material for theater’s history.

You can find these digitalized documents at www.epaveldas.lt and www.miltinis.lt

Rare publications

 The library has been storing rare publications since 1989. At that time the base of the fund was composed of 3000 copies of books from Panevėžys State Public Library (which worked during the time in between World War I and II) and books from a linguist, teacher Leonas Kuodis’ (1902–1975) personals library. Now the fund has more than 37 000 publications, published untill 1945.

The oldest book in the library is Konstantinas Sirvydas trilingual dictionary “Dictorium trium lingvarum in usum studiosae iuventutis” fifth edition.

Books with signatures and dedications by prominent people of the region, as well as those with regional libraries’ stamps or personal book markings make a significant part of this fund. The fund has publications which were published until 1945 by the then existing publishing houses in Panevėžys and Panevėžys region, it also stores regional newspapers such as “Panevėžio garsas”, “Panevėžio balsas”, “Panevėžio apygardos balsas”. You can read the copies that are not in the physical fund at www.epaveldas.lt.