Professor Jerzy Vetulani passed away on the 6th of April 2017. He was born on 21st January 1936 in Kraków. In 1957 he earned his B.A. in Biology and in 1963 in Chemistry from Jagiellonian University. He began to work in 1957 at the Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków and got a PhD in 1966. Prof. Vetulani did Habiltation in Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy in Wrocław in 1976. His scientific career throughout all extremely active scientific life was connected with the Institute of Pharmacology. He became Head of the Department of Biochemistry in 1976 and from 1994 until 2002 he was the Deputy Director for Science Affairs and from 2002 Vice Chairman of the Scientific Council. He was elected Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a Doctor honoris causa degrees from the Medical University of Silesia and the Medical University of Łódź. He published about 240 original scientific papers in the areas of neuropharmacology and neurobiology. He was exceptional neuropharmacologist. His research, conducted together with Fridolin Sulser and his group allowed to obtain interesting data that repeatedly administered antidepressants induce adaptive changes in the noradrenergic system and to formulate a hypothesis on the mechanism of action of antidepressant drugs suggesting “downregulation” of β-adrenergic receptors. His research interests included neuropharmacology of addiction, neurodegeneration and mechanisms of memory. He was an excellent academic, admired and followed by many pharmacologists and neuroscientists. Professor Vetulani was also very active in the area of popularization of neuroscience. He was, a superb, provocative and witty speaker, someone who everybody wanted to hear. Professor Vetulani had the soul of the artist. In the late sixties, he was an announcer and one of the creators of famous Polish Kraków cabaret “Piwnica pod Baranami” (1954–1961) and more recently a regular participant in other cabaret “Gadający Pies”. Professor Jerzy Vetulani had many different talents and accompanying him always intellectual perversity and above all sense of freedom and independence.

The present Gdansk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences is the second oldest, unbrokenly operating, publicly available library in today’s Poland. Even on the European scale there are only a few libraries that are of similar age or older. There are many works on the history of the Gdansk Library and its growing collection of books through the centuries. Apart from a brief look at history, this particular article focuses, however, on one other aspect – loans of special collections for exhibitions organized outside the Library by external institutions – the so-called “loan service”. Such modern transformation of an old institution indicates the power of the library and its custodians not only to engage in cultural preservation, but also fostering culture. We should see the special collections loan service in the same light – as reaching out to the public instead of waiting for the public to reach the library. This fact alone indicates a growing shift in the understanding of the library as a service provider. For the purposes of this article, the Gdansk Library has subjectively selected five of the most important and interesting examples of external exhibitions that have used its “special collections loan service” between 2011 and 2020.