Participation of Central Libraries of the Subjects of the Russian Federation in the Organization of Scientific Activity

activities (R&D) carried out by the central libraries (CL) of the subjects of the Russian Federation. The author carried out the study basing on the questionnaire survey conducted by the National Library of Russia on the assignment of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation in accordance with the decision of the Annual Meeting of the Heads of Federal and Central Regional Libraries of Russia in 2020. Central libraries, in accordance with their functions and priority goals, are the basis of the country’s library system. Their role as scientific, methodological and coordinating centres of the library system of the region is established at the level of federal and regional library legislation.The questionnaire survey revealed that most libraries have regulatory and legal grounds for conducting R&D. Employees of the central libraries are actively engaged in scientific-research work on a wide range of topics. At the same time, there should be distinguished two main areas of scientific activity of the central libraries: scientific support for the activities of libraries and historical and cultural research of regional nature based on library collections. Along with that, it is necessary to develop common approaches to solving organizational issues of R&D and its support from methodological centres and management bodies. One of the problems is to bring the results of scientific work to a wide range of users. The paper notes that it is expedient to do this by including electronic copies of scientific publications of the central libraries in the section “To Library Professionals” of the National Electronic Library; by compliance with the federal legislation in the area of legal deposit and legal deposit of printed publications in electronic form; by including scientific publications of the central libraries in the system of the Russian Scientific Citation Index with placement in the Scientific Electronic Library (eLibrary). The use of the scientific potential of the central libraries is a significant condition for achieving the goals set out in the “Strategy for the Development of Librarianship in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2030”.