The article aims at characterizing the specific features of commemorative activities of one of the largest Russian universal research libraries — the State Public Scientific Technological Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPSTL SB AS) in the Soviet period. The phenomenon of historical memory became the research trend in Russian humanities of the first quarter of the XXI century reflecting a broader global interest in how societies construct, preserve, and reinterpret their past. The relevance stems from the shift in domestic Memory Studies toward examining libraries as unique agents of memory. For the first time commemorative activities of the large universal library, functioning as not only an information institute but also as the “institute of memory” are being analyzed. The study demonstrates that in the 1960s–1970s the core practices of SPSTL SB AS were exhibitions tied to All-U nion jubilees and canonical dates; from the early 1980s, there was a marked turn toward cultural-h istorical and regional themes.
