National Library of Sweden, National library in Östermalm, Stockholm, Sweden
The National Library of Sweden is a Renaissance Revival building located within Humlegården park, featuring cast iron architectural details and distinctive stonework. The structure houses more than 18 million items including books, manuscripts, recordings, and digital materials.
The library's roots reach back to King Gustav Vasa's 16th-century book collection, kept at Tre Kronor Palace. The 1661 Chancery Ordinance required printers to deposit two copies of every publication, one for the National Archives and one for the library, as a means of state censorship. After the 1697 palace fire destroyed 17,286 volumes and 1,103 manuscripts, the collections moved between noble palaces until 1768, when they entered the new royal palace. The present Humlegården building, designed by Gustaf Dahl in cast-iron technique, opened at the turn of 1877/78.
The library holds personal archives of Astrid Lindgren, August Strindberg and Dag Hammarskjöld, and since 2014 offers free-text search across many Swedish newspapers; issues older than 100 years can be read in full. The Codex Gigas, a 13th-century manuscript known as the Devil's Bible, came to Stockholm in 1649 as war booty from Prague.
Visitors access the collections through research services that help locate and retrieve specific materials according to your interests. Allow time to browse and work with materials, as the scale of holdings is substantial and accessing archived items follows particular procedures.
In 1996 the library began Kulturarw3, a project to collect and archive Swedish web pages. By 2014 the collection held over 5 billion objects, about 350 TB of data, gathered from domains such as .se, .nu, .com and .org.
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