The establishment of the Sejm Library followed Poland’s regaining
of independence in 1918 and the ensuing parliamentary election
of 1919. The library was set up at the end of 1919, and after many
organizational changes it came to incorporate the Senate Library and
the parliamentary archives. By 1939 the library’s collection amounted
to 78,000 volumes, including parliamentary and official publications
as well as books and journals on law and the social, economic, and
historical sciences. In September 1939, a fire destroyed part of the
collection, while the remaining 62,000 volumes were transported by
the Germans to Berlin where they disappeared in circumstances that
were never clarified. Only a small part of the collection, deposited before
the end of the war in Castle Houska in Czechoslovakia, returned
to Poland. In a one-chamber parliament set up after World War II,
the library, functioning under the name of the “Sejm Library,” had to
rebuild its collections almost from scratch. In 1991, the library took
over the 145,000 volume library collection of the former Archives
of the Polish Left, and in 1993 the Sejm Archives was incorporated
into it. Currently, the entirely automated library has a collection of
about 500,000 volumes and provides services for both chambers of
the Polish Parliament.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/16681
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Library Trends 58 (4) Spring 2010: The Purpose, Present Situation and Future of the Parliamentary Library. Edited by Gro Sandgrind and Hermina G.B. Anghelescu.
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