Book and manuscript collection of the Olonets Natural-Industrial and Historical-Ethnographic Museum

The Olonets Natural-Industrial and Historical-Ethnographic Museum, which can be seen as the forerunner of the modern National Museum of the Republic of Karelia, was established in Petrozavodsk under the Olonets Province Statistical Committee in 1871. Parts XI and XII of the museum’s program provided for the collection of ancient manuscripts and books. The purpose of the article is to study the composition and formation of the museum’s fi rst book and manuscript collection and the history of individual manuscripts that ended up in other repositories over the years. Information about books and manuscripts is extracted from published museum catalogues and descriptions from 1876-1918, from publications in the Olonets Province Gazette, and from archival sources. To date, 38 manuscripts from the early collection of the Olonets Museum have been found, which are currently stored in the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Scientifi c Archives of the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and in other institutions. The article presents some valuable manuscripts that have survived to the present day, including the Olonets collection of incantations of the XVII century, scroll letters of the XVII and the early XVIII centuries, the 1717 Paleostrovsky alphabet, letters of gratitude from the Old Believers dated to the XIX century, etc. Information about all the located manuscripts is systematized in the table at the end of the article. The relevance of the research is determined by the necessity of studying and preserving the book and manuscript collections, which are an important part of the national heritage.