The article gives a brief overview of research on the problems of preparing union catalogs; it shows that the creation of the national union catalogs’ system is a strategic direction for the library and information science development in Russia. The paper characterizes Database (DB) «Siberian and Far Eastern book. XVIII century - 1930: a union catalog» as an integral part of the Russian national bibliography created by the Department of Scientific Bibliography of the State Public Scientific Technological Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Providing information on the availability of publications in the collections of book depositories, the DB opens access to the collections of libraries and archives of Siberia and the Far East for a wide range of researchers-historians. Union catalogs of Siberian and the Far Eastern books as a part of the Russian retrospective national bibliography contribute to preserving the cultural and intellectual heritage of the country, making it accessible to modern and future users. The article demonstrates possibilities of DB using as a research tool, and a historical source. The authors present the analysis results of the DB documentary flow, some comparative results of studying book business development in Asian Russia in preand post-revolutionary periods.