Pedagogical Library of Davor Trstenjak – the Library of the Croatian School Museum

The pedagogical library of Davorin Trstenjak was founded in 1877 by the professional association of teachers – Croatian Pedagogic-Literary Assembly – the one that would also establish the Croatian School Museum 24 years later, in 1901. The books had been collected since the very foundation of the Assembly (1871), so when the Library opened, it had about 1000 titles. As soon as the Museum was founded, it “was evident that it should have a library attached, so the managing board decided to move the Assembly library from its former room into the School Museum and to generally make it a part of the museum”, as recorded in the first catalogue of the Museum in 1902. At that time, after a review and withdrawal of books considered not to belong to a pedagogical library, the Library had 1824 titles, or 3071 volumes. Although it had been a part of the Museum since 1901, the Library only came under the Museum’s management in 1967, and under its ownership in 1986. Since 1948, it has been named after a distinguished teacher, pedagogical and children’s author Davorin Trstenjak.

The holdings of the library were mostly acquired through gifts by literary and academic societies and institutions and prominent Croatian teachers, with a significant support during the first decades from the Territorial Government’s Department of Worship and Teaching (the so-called mandatory copy). Today it is funded by the City of Zagreb, its founder and principal funding body of the Museum.

In spite of its valuable and rich holdings, the Library has been closed down several times during its long history or has worked in extremely difficult circumstances. Along with books on education and pedagogy, it holds valuable material related to national history, children’s literature (up to 1945) and educational sciences. The oldest book is De rerum inventoribus, from 1590, by the English author and historian Polydore Vergil. The oldest book in Croatian is Usdasi Mandaljene pokornize by Ignjat Đurđević, published in Venice, and the oldest title published in Zagreb is Gazophylacium by Ivan Belostenec, dating from 1740. The Library holdings were the basis for establishing specific museum collections – the Collection of Textbooks and Manuals, the Collection of School Reports and the Collection of Regulations and Official Publications in Education.

The materials can be used in the reading room, where users have a reference collection at their disposal (dictionaries, encyclopaedias, lexicons), as well as current scholarly periodicals. The Pedagogical Library of Davorin Trstenjak exceeds the role of a museum library in terms of providing information for specialised and academic work of professional staff. Today it is an unavoidable location for all researchers of the history of Croatian education and pedagogy, as well as of Croatian cultural history in general.

Dr Štefka Batinić, Library Adviser and Curator