Swedish Royal Library

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KB in Humlegården park, Stockholm

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.

The present location of the Royal Library is, since 2 January 1878, in Humlegården park in Stockholm.

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.

Notable international people who have spent time studying at the Royal Library in Stockholm include the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin, who lived in Stockholm for several shorter periods during his exile from Tsarist Russia.

In 1953, the Swedish Royal 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 Royal Library in which the respective libraries agreed to exchange their countries' literature.

The manuscript collections include the illuminated Codex Gigas or "Devil's bible", the largest manuscripts in the world, and the Stockholm Codex Aureus.