The scientific research is devoted to the comprehensive analysis of museum publications of the 19th and early 20th centuries. as historical sources. The main task was to research the process of origin and formation of museum source studies on Ukrainian territory, to identify the source potential of the national museography of the specified period. The research was conducted in compliance with the principles of objectivity, historicism and multifactoriality. Philosophical (dialectical, hermeneutics) and general scientific (analysis, synthesis, induction, typology, statistical) methods are adapted to the needs of source research. A number of special-historical methods (heuristics, historical-genetic, historical-comparative, textological, biographical) were used. The dissertation analyzed the following types of museographic products: catalogs, descriptions, albums, indexes, museum reports, programs, collections, mono-publications. The analysis covers mainly museum editions of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Publications in letter format (postcards, announcements, posters), whose informative properties belong to the field of marketing, and not to source studies, were left out of consideration. In addition to museography, the source base of the research consisted of archival sources (manuscripts of museographic works, illustrative material for museum publications, journals of censorship committees, descriptions of archival cases, letters), published epistolary sources, marginalia, objects of museum collections. The total source base is 145 items. In the study of the historiography of the problem, it is shown that during the 16th - at the beginning of the 18th centuries. descriptions of temple treasures and private collections were submitted in the form of references to an authoritative source (the texts of the Old Testament) and in the form of reprints of museographic works by other authors. During the 18th - at the beginning of the 19th centuries. the published collections were reviewed as recommended literature for scientific development and expansion of knowledge about the gifts of nature and artifice. Since the second half of the 19th century, against the background of the spread of positivist ideas, museum catalogs and descriptions have been given the status of a tool of historical science - a reference publication that provides primary knowledge about the monuments stored in museum collections and can be used in research into the history of societies. Positivist scientists recommended turning to catalogs and inventories at the stage of searching for sources and determining the topic of scientific research. Actually, a look at the national museogaphic works of the 19th - early 20th centuries. as historical primary sources is manifested in the works of scientists of the USSR from the second half of the 20th century. Their research is focused on the problem of museum development in Ukraine. Considering this process from the point of view of the Marxist-Leninist tasks of building a Soviet society, the source potential of museography of the pre-Soviet period is clearly underestimated, mostly presented as errors and mistakes of the scientific, collection and exhibition work of the "bourgeois intelligentsia". Scientists of independent Ukraine revealed the source role of museography for the study of regional processes of formation of museum and library work, church history, archeology, antiquities and art studies in Ukraine. Ukrainian researchers offered a new look at the museographic work of the 19th and early 20th centuries, analyzing it through the prism of the nation-building movement in Ukraine. The result of the research is presented in paragraph 1.2. An important direction of the dissertation research concerns the term "museography", the process of its formation on the Ukrainian territory is presented in the context of the development of the definition in the European and Ukrainian scientific space. The work demonstrates the breakdown of the etymological definition in the European museological discourse, where from the second half of the 20th century. "museography" refers to practical actions with a museum collection (for example, creating an exposition). Meanwhile, in the USSR, in the post-Soviet scientific discourse and in Ukraine, the concept, although it received development, remained at the "etymological" positions. Thus, in a broader sense, museography is considered a branch of museology and is a type of scientific work aimed at describing the museum and...
