National Library of Poland

Central Polish library

The National Library (Biblioteka Narodowa) is the central Polish library, subject directly to the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland. The library collects books, journals, electronic and audiovisual publications published in the territory of Poland, as well as Polonica published abroad. It is the most important humanities research library, the main archive of Polish writing and the state centre of bibliographic information about books. It also plays a significant role as a research facility and is an important methodological center for other Polish libraries. The National Library was one of the first libraries in Europe that fulfilled the tasks of a modern national library in developing collections covering the entire body of Polish literature and making available to the public. Literature and making those works accessible to the public receives a copy of every book published in Poland as legal deposit. The Jagiellonian Library is the only other library in Poland to have a national library status.

Today the collections of the National Library are one of the largest in the country. Among 7,900,000 volumes (2004) held in the library are 160,000 objects printed before 1801, over 26,000 manuscripts (including 6,887 music manuscripts), over 114,000 music prints and 400,000 drawings. The library collections also include photographs and other iconographic documents, more than 101,000 atlases and maps, over 2,000,000 ephemera, as well as over 2,000,000 books and about 800,000 copies of journals from the 19th to 21st centuries. Notable items in the collection include 151 leaves of the Codex Suprasliensis, which was inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme Register in 2007 in recognition for its supranational and supraregional significance. In 2012 the library signed an agreement to add 1.3 million Polish library records to WorldCat.

The Catalogue of the Archbishops of Gniezno and Lives of the Bishops of Cracow by Jan Długosz is a 16th century manuscript illuminated by Stanislaw Samostrzelnik between 1531 and 1535. Today it resides in the collection of the National Library in Warsaw. A selection of illuminated Breviary pages from various unknown miniaturists working in and around Paris, Bruges and Gent in the middle of the 15th century. A breviary (from Latin brevis, 'short' or 'concise') is a liturgical book of the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church containing the public or canonical prayers, hymns, the Psalms, readings, and notations for everyday use, especially by bishops, priests, and deacons in the Divine Office. The Illuminated Sketchbook of Stephan Schriber (1494).

The National Library houses the Fryderyk Chopin manuscript collection, the largest collection of the composer's work. It also holds works from other important composers such as Józef Elsner, Karol Szymanowski, Grażyna Bacewicz, Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Komeda.