National Library of Sweden
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| Country | Sweden |
|---|---|
| Established | 1661 |
| Reference to legal mandate | The Government Approval Document for The Swedish National Library (available in Swedish) |
| Location | |
| Coordinates | 59°20′17″N 018°04′20″E / 59.33806°N 18.07222°ECoordinates: 59°20′17″N 018°04′20″E / 59.33806°N 18.07222°E |
| Collection | |
| Items collected | books, journals, newspapers, magazines, films,recorded sound, television, radio, manuscripts, maps, pictures, printed music, ephemera and digital resources |
| Size | Circa 18 million books and 7 million hours of audiovisual material |
| Criteria for collection | Suecana: publications published, broadcast or recorded in Sweden or by Swedish originator or concerning Sweden |
| Legal deposit | Yes, and agreements with publishers |
| Access and use | |
| Access requirements | Free. Registration for loans: be Swedish resident or citizen over 18. (Audiovisual may only be accessed for research purposes) |
| Circulation | 135, 187 (2009) |
| Other information | |
| Budget | 364,455,000 SEK (2015) |
| Director | Gunilla Herdenberg (since 2012) |
| Staff | 340 |
| Website | www.kb.se |
The National Library of Sweden (Swedish: Kungliga biblioteket, KB, meaning "the Royal Library") is the national library of Sweden. As such it collects and preserves all domestic printed and audio-visual materials in Swedish, as well as content with Swedish association published abroad. Being a research library, it also has major collections of literature in other languages.
The collections of the National Library consist of more than 18 million objects, including books, posters, pictures, manuscripts, and newspapers. The audio-visual collection consists of more than 7 million hours of recorded material.
The National Library is also a humanities research library, with collections of foreign literature in a wide range of subjects. The library holds a collection of 850 broadsides of Sweden dating from 1852.
The National Library also purchases literature about Sweden written in foreign languages and works by Swedes published abroad, a category known as suecana. The National Library has been collecting floppy disks, CR-ROMs, and other electronic storage media since the mid-1990s, along with e-books, e-journals, websites, and other digital material.
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.
According to the Swedish Legal Deposit Act publishers of printed material must send one copy of every object to the National Library and six other research libraries. Publishers of music, film, radio and TV must similarly submit copies to the library. In some cases only a sample of broadcast material has to be submitted.
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