Swedish Royal Library
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The Royal Library, or Kungliga Biblioteket (KB), 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 Royal Library. The motive for this provision stemmed not from a desire to preserve publications for posterity but from a desire to monitor their contents.
Since March 24, 1997, the Royal 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.
External links
- Kungliga Biblioteket (http://www.kb.se/) — Official site
- Kulturarw3 (http://www.kb.se/kw3/Beskrivning.htm) — Description of the Kulturarw3 projectde:Kungliga Biblioteket