National Library of Sweden
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The National Library of Sweden (Swedish: Kungliga biblioteket, KB, meaning "the Royal Library") is the national library of Sweden. As such it collects, describes, preserves and makes available all domestic printed materials in Swedish, as well as publications with Swedish association published abroad. Being a research library, it also has major collections of literature in other languages. The obligation to collect all printed works in Swedish was laid down in 1661 in an ordinance from the Swedish Privy Council Chancery. The ordinance (legal deposit) ordered all printers in Sweden to send two copies of every publication printed to the Chancery before the material was distributed. One copy was to go to the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet), the other to the National Library. The motive for this provision stemmed not from a desire to preserve publications for posterity but from a desire to monitor their contents.
The present location of the National Library is, since 2 January 1878, in the Humlegården park in Stockholm.
Since 24 March 1997, the National Library also archives the Swedish part of the World Wide Web as part of a project called kulturarw3 (a play on words; kulturarv is Swedish for cultural heritage). Initially, the contents was not available to the public due to issues of copyrights, but as of 2004 visitors to the library can access the archive from dedicated terminals.
The institution is also a Government agency charged with the responsibility of coordinating Sweden's research libraries and for the Library Information System, LIBRIS. The Swedish ISBN Agency [1] is a unit within the Royal Library, responsible for assigning ISBNs having the country prefix 91- (and 978-91-) for Sweden.
Notable international people who have spent time studying at the National Library of Sweden include the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, who lived in Stockholm for several shorter periods during his exile from Tsarist Russia.
In 1953, the National Library purchased considerable amounts of Russian literature from Leningrad and Moscow. These books were to form the basis of a Slavonic library in Stockholm. These plans were consolidated in an agreement made in 1964 between the Lenin Library in Moscow and the National Library in which the respective libraries agreed to exchange their countries' literature.
The manuscript collections include the illuminated Codex Gigas (also known as the "Devil's Bible"), the largest manuscripts in the world, and the Stockholm Codex Aureus.
[edit] External links
- National Library of Sweden, official site in English
- Kulturarw3, description of the Kulturarw3 project
- LIBRIS English version of the site
