Recommended Bibliography

a branch of scholarly and practical activity, one type of bibliography.

The principal social function of recommended bibliography in the USSR and other socialist countries is the promotion of general and vocational education and self-education and the dissemination of political, scientific, and aesthetic knowledge, aimed at the all-around development of the individual and the individual’s upbringing in the spirit of communism. Recommended bibliography serves as one of the basic means of promoting books and as a method for guiding reading. It incorporates the main Leninist principles of propaganda: partiinost’ (party spirit), nauchnost’ (scientific outlook), and relevance for life and for building communism. Books are promoted through various channels of mass communication: libraries, the periodical press, radio, and television.

The system of recommended bibliographical aids consists of publications encompassing the leading branches of knowledge and serving diverse fields of practical social activity. Such aids may be divided into three groups: those dealing with sociopolitical subjects, topics in the natural sciences and technology, and subjects in literature, literary scholarship, and art. There are also aids reflecting interdisciplinary problems. Recommended bibliographical aids are differentiated according to the sociode-mographic and other characteristics of readers’ groups and according to the designated goal, such as mastery of a particular branch of knowledge, broadening the reader’s political, general scientific, and cultural horizons, or increasing his work qualifications. The designated goal determines the bibliographical aid’s ideological and pedagogical intent, which dictates the types of problems treated by the aid, the selection of writings, the composition of the aid, and the form in which the material is presented.

Recommended bibliographical aids are used by propagandists and lecturers to disseminate knowledge, as well as by librarians engaged in various forms of individual and mass work with readers. Central, republic-level, and oblast (krai) libraries participate in creating the system of aids. N. K. Krupskaia played an important role in the development of Soviet recommended bibliography. In developing the theory of recommended bibliography, work is being done on the social functions of recommended bibliography, on the psychological and pedagogical problems of recommended bibliography, on the nature of book promotion, and on the ways of promoting books using recommended bibliographies. The Lenin State Library in Moscow is the coordinating and methodological center for recommended bibliography.

In the capitalist countries recommended bibliographical aids serve primarily the commercial interests of publishing companies.