The library of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica is a special library under Act No. 126/2015 Coll., § 11, paragraph 1. The library is a cultural, information and educational workplace of the Museum of the SNU. It acquires, processes, preserves, protects, and makes accessible its collections, and through its activities it serves the museum’s departments and, within its capabilities, other institutions by providing them with documents and information.
The first additions to the library collections date back to 1957. The library acquired them in the form of donations, as part of national exchange events from various institutions, purchases in antiquarian bookshops, or transfers.
Nowadays, the library has about 23 000 items. The collections are focused on literature on the history of Slovak society in the years 1938-1945, with an emphasis on the anti-fascist and national liberation struggle and the Slovak National Uprising in the context of the European anti-fascist resistance in the years of the Second World War, the post-war trials and rehabilitation of the insurgents. Since 2002, the library collection has been catalogued retrospectively in electronic form in the BACH system.
The library provides absentee loans for museum staff only. For researchers, we provide loans only in the form of attendance in the study room.
The library collections contain literature directly related to the Slovak National Uprising, the Second World War, national and international resistance in the Second World War, partisan activities, language dictionaries, various encyclopaedias, history of states, biographies, works on linguistics, geography (various geographical and historical atlases). In addition to Slovak and Czech literature, the library collections include publications of German, English, French, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Polish and, in a considerable number, Russian provenance.
Users have free access to the reader catalogues. The catalogues are divided into: author, title and theme catalogues. We specially process the catalogue with the following themes: Second World War, Slovak National Uprising, Great Patriotic War, catalogue dedicated to the resistance and the existence of the Slovak State, Slovak Republic (1939-1945). In addition to these, the library has also created a sub-catalogue covering particularly collections, bound journals, foreign literature, regional history, fiction and poetry.