Collections
Lund University Library has been building up its collections since the foundation of Lund University in 1666. Today the collections cover over twelve miles (ten kilometres) of shelf space, spanning over two thousand years and every possible subject.
Do you know that the University Library receives a legal deposit copy of every item published in Sweden? That is why our collections expand by two metres every day: books, daily newspapers, scholarly journals, advertisements, school directories, postcards, advent calendars, cycling maps, and bus timetables.
E-resources
Lund University Library provides access to one of the country’s largest collections of electronic journal articles and e-books. Students and staff at the University have access to more than two hundred scientific databases, four hundred thousand e-books, and twenty-nine thousand scholarly e-journals.
Special Collections
The University Library is one of Sweden’s largest and oldest research libraries, with special collections spanning more than two thousand years. The library has more than four kilometres of shelving dedicated to manuscripts and archive documents, thousands of old printed books from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, and image collections that contain more than one million photographs and graphic documents.
For the past decade, Lund University Library has worked actively on digitising much-requested material to make it directly accessible online. Currently, more than fifty thousand photographs, three thousand manuscripts, rare books, and thousands of old maps are freely available online.
The University Library’s special collections are too extensive to be entirely digitised. But anyone can order undigitised material for study in the library’s Special Collections Reading Room. The University Library’s special collections are for all interested in our cultural heritage, not only for the University’s researchers.
