Biblioteki nauczycielskie w XIX wieku na tle światowego bibliotekarstwa

The article is an attempt to analyse selected aspects of the 19lh c. librarianship. In the context of the global theoretical and practical achievements in this subject and a general overview of libraries, the situation of Polish libraries has been presented, their incontestable theoretical achievements (e.g. Joachim Lelewel’s Two Bibliographic Volumes') and the rise of some new forms of making book collections available to the general public, for example through teachers’ libraries. The author became also interested in the German libraries for teachers that were created in the 1870s in Upper Silesia. In the archives of the city of Bytom (nowadays the State Archives of Katowice) some interesting source materials for the study of those libraries have been found. The extant documents make it possible to trace the process of preparing a classified catalogue for such a library, the principles of gathering books, and the plans for getting the money necessary to increase the collection, together with the process of preparing rooms for the newly founded library. The documents in question bear witness to the advanced level of the development of the German librarianship in the Polish lands