Library of the Theatre Institute

To register to use the services of all the departments at the ATI, come to the Services Department with your ID (passport), fill in the registration form, pay the registration fee, and you can borrow books and study in the library all year round. Registration cards are obtained from the Services Department in the passage leading from Štupartská Street. 

ll of the library’s books, periodicals, audiovisual materials, and more can be browsed in our online catalogue. You can find out whether the materials you are interested in can be borrowed, if they can only be used on site (in the reading room), where the materials are, and whether they are currently available or on loan. Use our Classification System to search the catalogue by topic.

Books can be borrowed for a loan period of four weeks. Loans can be renewed – for example, through the reader’s account accessed through the Virtual Study.  To check out a book, go to the Loans Desk on the ground floor of the main building.

Researchers can listen to digitised recordings in MP3 on our research computers. Recordings are intended for the purpose of study, they cannot be copied or borrowed to use outside the study room. We recommend that visitors make a reservation in advance, otherwise there is no guarantee of available space.

A part of the library’s collection (CDs only) can be borrowed to use off the premises of the Theatre Institute. These materials can be borrowed during the library’s opening hours and the Library Rules apply to loans of such materials.

The Periodicals Reading Room is located on the 1st floor of the main building. It has a collection of selected periodicals (both current issues from this year and older issues of Czech titles, indicated in the catalogue with the letter B) that visitors can read without ordering in advance. Other periodicals stored in the depository can be ordered through this online form. The materials will be ready in the Reading Room for the reader to use the next operating day.

The Services Department accessed off the passage leading to Štupartská Street has a reading room with a small library, but it is also an accessible space for disabled researchers. They can arrange in advance to have materials from the institute’s other collections brought to them to use here in the reading room.

On request most of the library’s materials can be copied for a fee (based on the current price list). Electronic copies or copies of articles from periodicals that are not in our library’s collection can be obtained through the services of the Virtual Polytechnical Library (VPK) for a fee based on the current VPK price list.

Digitised materials in the collection of the Theatre Institute’s Library are accessible in the Kramerius digital library system. Here visitors can find rare manuscripts of plays, some periodicals, Prague Quadrennial catalogues, and other selected publications from the Theatre Institute. In compliance with copyright law the full-text versions of most of these materials can only be accessed on the premises of the ATI.

Portaro is a digital library integrated directly into the online catalogue and can be used to display inside the catalogue the full texts of digitised materials that previously could only be accessed through Kramerius Digital Library.

Select an early title in the library’s collection published between 1500 and 1900 and order it as an e-book. .

An interlibrary loan service is available for readers outside Prague and is provided through their local library. 

Each year we draw up a list of the periodicals that we currently subscribe to, new foreign literature added to our collection (specialised works and stage plays), unpublished theatre texts, and theatre texts printed in periodicals. These lists and an archive dating back to 1997 can be found here.