National Science Library, National library in Tbilisi, Georgia

The National Science Library occupies a five-storey building at 1/4 Alexidze Street, opposite the circus in Tbilisi's Akademgorodok, designed by architects G. Lezhava and I. Liberman and opened in 1970. It has 90 work rooms, a 200-seat main reading hall and six subject reading halls, on a 10,000 m² floor area with a 1.25-hectare yard. A second building at 47 Kostava Street holds the former technical library's patents and standards.

Founded in 1941 alongside the Georgian Academy of Sciences, the library initially served only academy researchers with a stock of 2,000 volumes. A fundamental library was established in 1945, and by 1949, under director V. Uznadze, the collection reached 400,000 items. The current five-storey building on Alexidze Street, designed by architects G. Lezhava and I. Liberman, opened in 1970. In 2006, it merged with the G. Mikeladze Scientific-Technical Library to form the National Science Library.

The library holds the personal collections of scholars and public figures such as Ekvtime Takaishvili and Vukol Beridze, and the 100,000-volume library-museum bequeathed by poet-academician Iosif Grishashvili. It keeps every Georgian edition and translation of Shota Rustaveli's poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin. It also hosts symposia, seminars and scientific book fairs.

Access to the collections typically requires registration, but visitors can usually use study areas and explore the museum section. It helps to check ahead which areas are open to the public and what materials you might need to view.

Among the holdings are a book by V. Korbo describing the remains of a 5th–6th-century Georgian monastery, received from the Vatican Library, and a microfilm of the 10th-century Breta Gospel from Oxford University. Microfilms of 9th–11th-century Sinai and Jerusalem Georgian manuscripts came from the US Library of Congress. The library also keeps every Georgian edition and translation of Shota Rustaveli's poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin.