Books, manuscripts, correspondence – a view of the historian of science of the 21st century

It will be about the «equipment» of the history of science (in our case, of the history of mathematics) —that serves for researcher as the material source from which he extracts the information necessary for his work. The collection, storage and methods of their use have always been in the field of close attention of scientists, although the corresponding problems did not constitute (at least to this day) a separate special branch of historical research. At the same time, these problems often went to their front line. This happened, for example, in the middle of the XIX century in connection with the scandal about the theft of books and manuscripts by the well-known mathematician and distinguished historian of mathematics G. Libri (1803 - 1869). In recent decades, the importance of these problems has grown significantly in connection with studies on the so-called "social history of mathematics." It is supposed to discuss, firstly, some aspects of this topic that appeared during the work of the speaker himself (on the history of the mathematical culture in medieval Russia and on the Russian mathematics of the XIX – XX centuries), and, secondly, the problems of compiling manuscript catalogs of the materials on the history of mathematics which stored in archives and museums, and the prospect of their unification into an united international network.