National and University Library of Iceland

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Þjóðarbókhlaðan

Landsbókasafn Íslands - Háskólabókasafn (The National and the University Library of Iceland) was established 1994 in Reykjavík, Iceland. It is by far the largest library in Iceland with about 900,000 items. It keeps most of the manuscript from the 12th–14th centuries in which the Icelandic Sagas are written.

The library resides in the Þjóðarbókhlaða (The National Book Barn), a 51,000 cubic meters (13,000 square meters) building near the main campus of the University of Iceland. The building took 16 years to complete, due to a lack of government funding, resulting in considerable debate about the construction and the handling of the project. In the early 1980s, the government introduced a specially targeted tax to complete the constructions. However, this did not alleviate the debate, because the proceeds of the tax were diverted to fund general government expenditures. Davíð Oddsson, former Prime Minister of Iceland, made it one of his priorities to complete the work and the building was opened in 1994 on the 50th birthday of the republic.