Uppsala University Library 400 years

Uppsala University Library is turning 400 and is celebrating this anniversary by converting 400 doctoral dissertations into electronic form so that their complete texts are freely available in DiVA. If you defended your thesis at Uppsala University during the period 1973–2003, you can now have your doctoral thesis converted into electronic form and make your research available through open access for colleagues and other interested readers around the world.

Read more on how

Join a library-historical city walk and see the library's different locations for the past 400 years.

Dance and music from the 18th century from the Leufsta Collection.

The great fire of Uppsala ravished the town in 1702. Professor Olof Rudbeck the Elder kept a lot of materials for the printing of his botanical works in the Uppsala Cathedral, a building that was destroyed. Did everything vanish in the fire? What is left in our collections?

In 2020 and 2021 we celebrated Uppsala University Library's first 400 years with an anniversary exhibition. This exhibition highlighted how its large and unique collections found their way to the library through required legal deposit copies, donations and other means, and how the Library's locations have changed over the past 400 years from damp facilities near Uppsala Cathedral to today's physical and digital environments.

Exhibition catalogue

Gustav II Adolf founded Uppsala University Library through two resolutions (1620 and 1621). In these resolutions, the king announced his decision to donate a larger book collection to the University and to allocate an annual sum to the activities of a library. We therefore celebrated the library's 400th anniversary both in 2020 and 2021.

An introduction to the jubilee:

Read more about our history