Books – Old Prints Sub-Collection

History of the Sub-Collection

The Library of the National Museum of Agriculture is, as a library with a specific focus on agriculture, an important part of the national system of libraries. It provides access to specialised information and is an integral part of the infrastructure of research, development, and specialised education. The Library of the National Museum of Agriculture is registered in accordance with § 5 of Act No. 257/2001 Coll. on Libraries and Terms of Operating Public Library and Information Services (Library Act) by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic based on a certificate with filing number 5963/2004 as a public library with a specialised book collection. It manages 100,000 book items which are located at three branches of the National Museum of Agriculture. These items cover a selection of book and journal production related to agriculture. Majority of the collection consists of items from the twentieth century, a smaller part from the nineteenth and eighteenth century, and some individual items are older still. In 2007, the museum started to form a ‘Books – Old Prints’ sub-collection, mainly in order to provide a higher level of protection to the relevant items. Items belonging to this sub-collection were gradually removed from the general museum library based on a chronological criterion, so that the new sub-collection started by including old prints dating to a period prior to 1700, and then proceeded to eighteenth-century items.