The glass walls of the new annex are decorated with wide colourful inserts depicting book spines; behind these walls the Storage premises are located. In the long run, the purpose of these premises has expanded.

While standing with your back to the Storage, you can see a gray building on the right side. On the first floor of this building, the first printing house and bookshop in Panevėžys and this region of Lithuania, owned by Naftalis Feigenzonas, operated, whereas on the second floor, there were residential premises. In February 1880, Naftalis Feigenzonas, a resident of Ukmergė, applied to the Kaunas governor with a request to give a permission to establish a printing house in Panevėžys, in the summer of the same year, such permission was granted. The printing house began operating on Dvorianskaya Street (now Respublikos St. 16) and had a lithography machine; therefore, it could carry out various orders. It printed receipts, government letters, business cards, labels for city enterprises, blanks, event programs, and different publications. At the end of 1880, Naftalis Feigenzonas received a permission to open a bookshop alongside the printing house, and in 1881, this bookshop began to also perform library functions. The bookshop sold books, textbooks, and publications of religious content in Russian, Polish, German, French, and Hebrew. A few years later, in 1886, Naftalis Feigenzonas requested a permission to establish a newspaper and book reading room next to the bookshop.

From 16 February 1924, the first regular city newspaper “Panevėžio balsas” began to be printed in this room. Here you can also see the catalog drawers. Before LIBIS (the Lithuanian Integrated Library Information System) existed, all publications stored in the library were cataloged manually, and card catalogs were compiled for both readers and personnel. We kindly invite you to open the catalog drawers and see how the cards were filled out. This unique space also exhibits document, photograph, and art exhibitions. Flower exhibitions are also held here every year. In the spring, the collector Jānis Salens from Latvia used to bring his tulip collection, and in August, commemorating the day of the Baltic Way, a group of florists usually presents collections of gladioluses and dahlias. This is a great place to enjoy the beauty of flowers, especially due to the proper overhead lighting.

The library is adapted to store up to 700,000 physical documents, and currently, it has almost 450,000 books, magazines, sheet music, and other publications. About 189,000 printouts are accumulated in the Storage, of which about 45,000 units are ten-year-old and older periodicals, whereas the remaining 144,000 units are books by Lithuanian and foreign authors, monographs, serial publications, donated libraries by people from the Panevėžys region. More than 1,000 books have autographs, as well as maps, reproductions, postcards, and miniature souvenir books. If we put them in a single line, the length of the Storage shelves would extend for about 5 kilometers.

All fiction books from the Storage are issued for home use; you can order them through ibiblioteka and pick them up at the Publications Issuance Point situated on the first floor. Some publications, such as rare, unique, collectible, or art albums, are intended to be read only in the library’s reading rooms—you will see this information when ordering the publication in ibiblioteka.

In order to utilize space efficiently, books in the Storage are kept according to their size and strictly by code: the smallest books (up to 10 cm) are in R format, whilst the largest ones (over 33 cm) are in M format.

The Storage is one of the places in the library where readers are not allowed inside. Its collection is spread over three floors: the largest (by format) and heaviest books are stored in the basement, for instance, art albums and sets of periodicals from the Local History Reading Room. On the second floor—the most frequently requested Lithuanian books, and a separate room is dedicated to rare publications and the manuscript collection. On the third floor—the oldest periodicals and part of the collection of personal libraries.

The periodicals published in Panevėžys and currently
collected in the Storage are being made available in electronic format. Some have already been digitized; they can be found on the computers in the Local History Reading Room, on the library’s developed portal “Panevėžio kraštas virtualiai” (Panevėžys Region Virtually) or read in the electronic heritage system “E-Heritage”.

Each year, the Storage is supplemented with more than 1,200 new publications, and more than a thousand more come from other library departments; these are publications having a cultural, scientific, or artistic value.