Arbejderbevægelsens Bibliotek og Arkiv ABA Workers Museum Library & Archive

History and Founding

The Labor Movement's Library and Archives (Arbejderbevægelsens Bibliotek og Arkiv, ABA) was founded in 1909 by the principal organizations of the Danish labor movement. It operated as a separate institution until 2004, when it merged with The Workers' Museum (Arbejdermuseet), which is housed in the original Workers' Assembly Building in central Copenhagen — a building constructed by the labor movement in 1879 and on UNESCO's tentative World Heritage list. The merged institution today consists of a museum, an archive, and a library open to the public.

Collections and Holdings

The ABA is the central archive for employee organizations and left-of-center political parties and organizations in Denmark. Its holdings include approximately 3,000 organizational archives and 400 personal archives. The library contains approximately 80,000 books and approximately 6,000 periodicals, of which around 1,000 are current ongoing subscriptions. The combined holdings span more than 12 shelf-kilometers of material on the labor movement and the history of the left. The archive holds materials from the social democratic movement, trade unions, the communist party, and related organizations.

Notable Materials Related to Journalism/Media

The archive holds press collections from the social democratic newspaper Socialdemokraten (later Aktuelt) and the communist newspaper Land og Folk — two of the largest such collections in its holdings. The combined photo archives contain approximately 3 million photographs, including portraits of prominent Danes, international figures, and documentation of everyday life in Denmark. Nearly 80,000 photos have been digitized and are searchable online.

Access and Usage

Books available for home loan may be ordered via bibliotek.dk and picked up at a local Danish library. Archival records must be used in the archive reading room at the Workers Museum, and must be ordered in advance with an access application. The Archive Reading Room is open daily from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, with extended hours until 8:00 PM on Thursdays.