Royal Danish Library Digital Collections Landing Page (Det Kongelige Bibliotek)

Overview

The Royal Danish Library's Digital Collections landing page (kb.dk/en/find-materials/systems-and-services/digital-collections) serves as the central navigational hub for researchers and the public seeking to explore the library's numerous digitized catalogues and online services. The Royal Danish Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek) is Denmark's national library, founded in 1648, and operates physical locations in both Copenhagen and Aarhus.

Purpose and Navigation

Because the library's digital materials are distributed across many specialized search services and catalogues—each optimized for a particular type of material—the landing page provides users with a structured overview and direct links to individual digital collections. These include dedicated catalogues for images, Western manuscripts, Judaistic manuscripts and early prints, maps and atlases, political manifestos, rare books, and printed matter (småtryk), among others. The page also directs users to the library's various guides, which help researchers navigate the broader digital landscape.

Scope of Digital Materials

The collections accessible via this landing page reflect the full breadth of the Royal Danish Library's holdings, which encompass manuscripts from the Middle Ages to the present, an extensive national newspaper collection, radio and television broadcasts, sheet music, sound recordings, aerial photographs (over 5.2 million units), and architectural drawings. The library holds more than 18 million items in its prints and photographs collection alone. The library harvests four electronic copies of the Danish internet each year as part of its legal deposit mandate, extended to digital materials in 2006.

Access

The landing page is freely accessible online. From it, researchers can navigate to specific catalogues and determine access conditions for individual materials—most materials over 100 years old are freely available, while more recent content may require on-site access. The page also links to the library's integrated catalog at kb.dk, which supports searches across millions of digitized items.