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Short Descriptions

Founded: 1817
Library holdings (departmental libraries holdings are excluded): 2,483,787 vol.
Books: 1,558,520 vol.
Serials: 613,694 vol.
Special collections: 311,573
Staff: 248 people
Building:
- 2 underground levels
- 4 storeys
Computers: 290, including 101 public

The University Library is one of the three largest collections of scholarly books in Poland. Not only does it function as the University's main library, but also as a public library. It contains domestic and foreign works from each of the disciplines of the arts and sciences studied and taught at the University, with collections in the humanities and social sciences most thoroughly represented. In cooperation with respective departmental libraries of the University, it acts as the country's leading library in the following fields:
- Archaeology
- Biology
- Education
- Philosophy
- Physics
- Political Science
- Psychology
- Science Studies
- Sociology.

The Library numbers approximately 2,400,000 volumes, including more than 1,500,000 books, 600,000 volumes of periodicals, early imprints, manuscripts, graphics, musical scores, maps, and microfilms. As a whole the Library regularly serves more than 20,000 readers, with more than 300,000 items accessed and lent annually.

Select items from the Warsaw University Library collections are also made available on microform in cooperation with Norman Ross Publishing Inc.
For more information please inquire: info@nross.com
or visit web page www.nross.com

The Library was established at the founding of the Warsaw University in 1817, acquiring such collections as those of the Warsaw Lyceum, the private libraries of King Stanisław Poniatowski and Stanisław Kostka Potocki, as well as libraries from suppressed monasteriers.

The collection of rossica is extremely valuable and is one of the largest in the world. The Library likewise possesses a large collection of Polish and foreign periodicals, newspapers, and administrative documents, with an especially impressive collection of the Warsaw press and underground periodicals from years 1939-1945.

Since the late fall of 1999, the Library occupies a state-of-the art building at the distance of two blocks from the main campus, at the Powisle district where it is supposed to play the role of the anchor of the emerging new campus. Construction of a new library was begun in 1995, financed by the Foundation of Warsaw University. Its over 40,000 square meters are able to house over 4,000,000 items, of which approximately 200,000 are now on open stacks. There is room for over 2,000,000 items on open stacks, and the shelf arrangement system is Library of Congress Call Numbers.

The Library currently occupies four overground levels of the building: level 0, inaccessible to users, contains closed stack, acquisition, and a conservation lab; level 1 - Reference Department and Circulation Desk; level 2 - main Reading Room and Current Periodicals and Microforms Reading Room; and level 3 - special collections. Most of the levels' 1 and 2 surface is open stacks; individual study cells, seminar and exhibition rooms are at various locations. The Library is equipped to provide working place for 1,000 simultaneous users, and the computer system allows 256 simultaneous sessions.

The Library's façade, inviting scholars with giant copper plates with fragments of great writings in various alphabets, has already become one of the city's landmarks.

In 1992, thanks to a grant from the Mellon Foudation, the Library purchased, together with several other Polish academic libraries, an automated integrated library system (VTLS). Since then, the Library has coordinated shared cataloguing in Poland, and its Center for Formats and Authority Files acted as a bibliographic utility serving ca. 20 research libraries. The University online catalogue is a WWW-searchable pool of records from the main library and selected departmental libraries. Their number is supposed to increase.

The University Library ensures network access to approximately 50 CD-ROM databases. Extensive access to full-text journals by leading publishers is being organized in various consortial settings to become operational in 2000. The Library's Reference Center is responsible also for several other networked or local sources of information for and about the University.