Sejm Library

The library of the Polish Sejm.

From the longer Polish Wikipedia page

The creation of the Sejm Library connects with the regaining of independence in 1918 by the Polish State and the parliamentary elections in 1919. It was created at the end of this year, and after numerous organizational changes it served as both a library and an archive of the Sejm and the Senate.

The collection, enriched with the materials of the Sejm and the Senate as well as official prints, as well as acquisitions in the field of law, social, economic and historical sciences, numbered 78 thousand in 1939. volumes. During the fire of the Sejm building in September 1939 part of the collection was burned down, and the remaining 62 thousand. The Germans took the Germans to Berlin, where they disappeared in circumstances not yet explained. Only a small part of the collection, filed at the end of World War II in the Czech castle of Houska, returned to Poland.

During World War II, the Library lost 61% of its collections (48,000 from 78 thousand units)

After the war, as a library of a unicameral parliament at that time, she received the name of the "Sejm Library" and began shaping its resources from the very beginning. In the years 1981-1991 its director was prof. Andrzej Gwiżdż. In 1991, the Library took over the collection of the former Archive of the Polish Left, numbering 145 thousand. volumes, and in 1993, the Sejm Archives were attached to it.

The main collection of the BS is the book collection built since the Library was founded in 1919, and as a result of damage and significant war losses - collected to a large extent from now after 1945. The nature of this part of the collection is determined by the BS mission, which is documenting and supporting the legislative process, including satisfying the needs of the research, consulting and information facilities of the Sejm. On the one hand, BS collects parliamentary and official publications, on the other - the literature on a wide range of issues, being the theoretical and methodological basis for legislative work. A unique part of the collection is a set of publications of the Sejm and Senate from 1919 (prints, stenographic reports, bulletins from committee meetings, etc.) and Polish legislation (dailies, official diaries of ministries and central offices and voivodships), and analogous publications from approx. 30 countries, mainly European ones, obtained as a rule through the exchange of publications of the Sejm and the Senate. BS also has official publishing houses of the European Union, the UN, the Council of Europe, the Western European Union and NATO, including texts of conventions, treaties and other international agreements developed by these organizations. The number of Polish and foreign parliamentary and official publications available in the BS in parallel or solely in the form of electronic documents is constantly increasing; since 2003, BS has the status of an electronic deposit library of the United Nations, which means interrupting the completion of many current titles and allows gradual selection of the UN documentation in the printed form that has been collected for more than 50 years.

The English language version of the website is