Bernhard Harms as Founder of the German National Library of Economics

Abstract

In 2019, the German National Library of Economics — Leibniz Information Centre for Economics celebrated the 100th anniversary of its foundation. Despite such a long period of existence, there is little information about it in the Russian literature. In the works devoted to German librarianship, there is not enough attention paid to the specialized libraries. Currently, the collection of the German National Library of Economics holds 4,42 million items. In the professional community of economists, it is known for the EconStor repository, which provides open access to 200 thousand documents on economics and related sciences. The library owes its creation to the German economist, world economy specialist Bernhard Harms (1876—1939), who founded the Kiel Institute for Maritime Transport and World Economics in 1914.The purpose of the article is to present the professional activity of B. Harms, his role in the foundation of the institute and the library. The sources for studying the scientist’s activities on organization of the library were the publications of B. Harms and his followers (A. Predel and V. Gulich), articles and books by German researchers dedicated to the institute and the library, as well as Internet resources.The article highlights the main periods of B. Harms’ life path. The author analyzes the “Kiel” period of the economist’s life (1908—1933), when he managed to apply his organizational and leadership abilities to found, in addition to the Kiel Institute for Maritime Transport and World Economics, the subject fields library, the scientific archive, the periodical and the scientific club. The article reveals the activities of B. Harms, little known to Russian readers, as well as to the library specialists, on the transformation of reference library, created at the Seminary of Public Sciences of the Christian-Albrecht University in Kiel, into the independent specialized library for economic sciences, which over the years has become one of the largest in the world.