The National Library in Humlegården

The National Library in Humlegården

In July 1871, the foundation was laid for what would become the new library in Humlegården, Stockholm. The architect was Gustaf A. Dahl.

Photo
Jens Östman, The National Library of Sweden
Image rights
The image is free to use if the photographer's name is credited

The Natio­nal Libra­ry of Sweden

The National Library of Sweden collects, preserves, describes, and provides access to Sweden’s published cultural heritage. The library also promotes the development of open science. In addition, we provide a national overview of the library sector.

The National Library of Sweden is a government agency under the Ministry of Education and Research and is a national research infrastructure. Through our work, we contribute to the quality of Swedish research and to the development of a democratic society. The agency also receives assignments from the Ministry of Culture.

The National Library is headed by the National Librarian, Karin Grönvall.

Our operations are divided into three areas: The National Library's collections, scholarly publications, and the public library sector.

The National Library’s collections

Shelves with records in an archive.

The National Library collects, preserves, describes, and provides access to Sweden’s published cultural heritage. Our collections therefore include everything from manuscripts, books and newspapers, to music, television broadcasts and images. The material reaches us in both physical and digital formats.

The physical collections currently consist of more than 190 kilometres of shelving, most of which is stored in underground repositories. The collections grow by more than three metres of shelving every day, while our servers are continuously filled with large volumes of digital cultural heritage.

Everyone is welcome to explore our collections and services, either onsite or online.

Legal deposit for independent research

Our collection of Sweden’s published cultural heritage is made possible by two legal deposit laws. These require printers, producers, publishers, and distributors to submit legal deposit copies of their material to us. The Library preserves everything without evaluating or selecting what is kept.

The collections also grow through donations from organisations and the public. We also acquire certain materials, primarily foreign material related to Sweden and international research literature.

Preserving and providing access to cultural heritage

The National Library continuously works to preserve and reduce wear on our collections. A central part of this work is digitisation, which involves converting physical material into digital files. This allows us to preserve content for the future and make it accessible to more users.

To help users find what they are looking for among the millions of items in our collections, we work actively with cataloguing and metadata. Through accurate information and subject indexing, materials become searchable in our services. We use AI technology developed in-house to continuously improve searchability.

National research infrastructure

The National Library is a national research infrastructure. This means that we provide researchers with advanced tools and access to Sweden’s published cultural heritage through both physical and digital services.

A key prerequisite for providing this access is that our collections are available in digital form. Therefore, it is essential that we both collect born-digital material and digitise our physical collections.

Through our AI initiative, KB Lab, researchers can conduct large-scale analyses of the material in the form of datasets – organised collections of data. Based on the collections, the lab also develops open AI models for research purposes.

Scholarly publications

Books in a stack next to a computer with the padlock that symbolizes open access.

The National Library is tasked with promoting and coordinating efforts for open access to scholarly publications. The goal is for publications to be freely available to read, download, share, and use.

Through various initiatives, we also work to promote equity in open science – striving for research that is open, inclusive, and useful.

As part of this mission, we operate Publicera, a national platform for Swedish scholarly open access journals. The platform and all its content are freely available. The National Library also operates and develops the Swepub data source, which makes it possible to evaluate scholarly publications produced in Sweden.

National consortium and guidelines

The National Library administers the national Bibsam Consortium, which negotiates agreements for open access publishing and access to scholarly journals and databases. The consortium's members include Swedish higher education institutions, government agencies, and public research institutes.

The Library has also developed national guidelines for open science and co-manages the website Openscience.se External link. in collaboration with several other organisations. We also promote collaboration between different actors in the research community to ensure that research is disseminated and used.

The public library sector

Two smiling librarians with a book cart in a library.

The National Library is responsible for maintaining a national overview of the library sector. This means monitoring and analysing developments and promoting collaboration across the public library system.

We produce Sweden’s official library statistics, presenting data from libraries across the country. The library also maintains a national development plan for the sector, which is updated annually.

Equal access to library resources

Another part of our work involves supporting and developing national library services. The goal is to provide the public with equal access to the country’s collective library resources. Among other things, we administer and develop the national library catalogue, Libris.

The National Library is also tasked with implementing an initiative for resource libraries serving the national minorities and national minority languages: Finnish, Yiddish, Meänkieli, Romani Chib, and Sámi.

International collaboration

An illustrated map of the world.

The National Library collaborates internationally, in many different forms and on different levels. Certain international collaboration is crucial to our operations: metadata, classification, standards and EU laws, which are a part of an international framework. This also goes for our work with national minorities and the indigenous Sami.