The departments of the Austrian National Library
In our 8 departments, important treasures of Austrian cultural heritage are preserved and made accessible to scholars. The departments are constantly growing, thanks to new acquisitions, and can be studied in reading rooms with the latest facilities.
The Picture Archives and Graphics Department is Austria’s largest centre of pictorial documentation with holdings of approximately three million objects in different historical types of media.
The historical core of the former imperial Court Library: discover one of the world’s most important collections of manuscripts and prints.
The Map Department looks after about 295,000 sheet maps, around 45,000 geographical-topographical plans, 800,000 picture postcards, 700 globes, 100 reliefs and models of castles and about 83,000 volumes of specialist literature and atlases.
The Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library collects lifetime and posthumous literary bequests from Austrian authors from the 20th century onwards and makes them available for academic study.
Our music collection constitutes Austria's biggest music archive, and is both a modern academic research library and a place where the most valuable original musical manuscripts are kept.
The papyrus collection, with about 180,000 items, is one of the largest of its kind in the world. In October 2001, the collection was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register of documentary heritage.
Ever since it was founded in 1927, the Esperanto Museum of the Austrian National Library has held an extensive library, and in 1990 this was given the name Department of Planned Languages.
Here you will find a huge collection of books and journals about folk songs, folk music, folk dancing and folk poetry in Austria.