Reconstruction of 18th-century private libraries: experience the methodological research

The article is devoted to such a socio-cultural phenomenon in the history of Russia, as noble personal libraries of the 18th century, is an analysis of the extent of their knowledge based on scientific literature, reviewed existing methodologies and approaches for detecting them, description, reconstruction. Shows how to work with personal libraries in the country’s largest funds: the State Hermitage Museum, the library of the Academy of Sciences, Russian State and national libraries, the Moscow and St Petersburg universities, as well as a number of regions, including Ural. The modern classification of sources of learning about personal libraries, it is shown that they do not all apply to book collections of the 18th century, with constraints and its peculiarities. Given certain types of sources: ownership and other directories, property records, examples of their use and creation. Conclusion on the feasibility of the application of the complex variety of sources for the reconstruction of the whole personal libraries, even in cases where the book collections were lost, which is especially important with respect to advanced research in this field for the Ural region.