We hold both Old Polish manuscript books and contemporary personal archives, including letters, typescripts, prints, photographs and press cuttings. At present, our collection comprises over 23,000 manuscripts, most of which date from the 19th and 20th centuries. Separate holdings include documents issued by Polish kings, princes and state offices from the 13th to the 20th centuries (about 2,240 items) and manuscripts from the Pawlikowski Library in Medyka (about 290 items).
The collection can be divided into several thematic groups:
The manuscripts currently held in Wroclaw are part of the collection collected by the Ossolineum in Lwów (Lviv) until the Second World War. The rest, currently held in the Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv, are available in digital form (e.g. the Autograph Collection, the Dzieduszycki, Pawlikowski and Sapieha Archives). Detailed information on manuscripts is available in printed and electronic catalogues.
The manuscript collections of the National Ossolinski Institute were based on the private collections of the Institute's founder, Count Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński (about 700 manuscripts), which came, among other things, from the family collections of various branches of the Ossoliński family. After the death of Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński in 1827, they were transported together with the entire library collection from Vienna to Lwów (Lviv), the seat of the National Ossoliński Institute.
In Lwów (Lviv), the number of manuscripts grew steadily, mainly thanks to the generosity of the Polish public, which recognised the Ossolineum as a national library. As a result of numerous donations and purchases, the collection grew and, from the 1840s onwards, was divided into three groups: manuscripts (codices), diplomas (documents) and autographs (mainly letters of important personalities). If in 1851 the collection consisted of about 1,100 manuscripts, 140 diplomas and 2,155 autographs, by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1938 the manuscript collection of the Ossolineum (including the collection of the Pawlikowski Library, which formed a separate unit within it) comprised about 13,800 manuscripts, about 2,500 diplomas and about 11,700 autographs, making it one of the largest and most valuable collections in Poland, an indispensable resource for research and a treasury of national literature.
The period of the Second World War and the incorporation of the Ossolineum into Ukrainian and German library structures did not significantly affect the previous character and condition of the collection, and even led to its growth, This was due, among other things, to the nationalisation by the Soviet authorities in 1939-1940 of many of the collections deposited here at the beginning of the war (including the autograph of "Pan Tadeusz" by Adam Mickiewicz from the collection of the Tarnowski family of Dzików) and the takeover of unattended, mainly private collections (including the collection of the Dzieduszycki Library in Poturzyca).
In the spring of 1944, on the orders of the German library authorities, the (clandestine) director of the Ossolineum evacuated the most valuable manuscripts (about 2,300 items, including manuscripts by Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki) and diplomas (about 2,200 items) to Krakow, which were transported to Adelin (Zagrodno) in Lower Silesia in July of the same year.
In July 1946, Ukraine handed over to Poland about 6,630 manuscripts from the collections of the Ossolineum, which, together with early printed books and prints from the 19th and 20th centuries, were transported to Wroclaw, where they formed the basis of the library of the National Ossolinski Institute. In addition, in 1947 and 1948, the National Library in Warsaw delivered the collections found in Adelin, which had been evacuated from Lwów (Lviv) in the spring of 1944. In later years, manuscripts lent to other institutions before the war and dispersed from Adelin were also returned.
Ultimately, the manuscript collection in Wroclaw from the former Lwów (Lviv) holdings comprised some 9,300 manuscripts (of which some 6,135 were inventoried) and some 1,510 documents, representing some 73% of the inventoried manuscripts, some 30% of the non-inventoried manuscripts and some 63% of the inventoried documents. Unfortunately, due to the division of the collection in Lwów (Lviv), most of the collections, family archives and legacies were transferred to Wrocław in a decomposed form. Among the collections transferred to Wroclaw, the autograph collection was almost completely missing, as well as several larger collections that either had separate references or were not included in the general sequence of references in the inventory in Lwów, such as the Sapieha archive from Krasiczyn. The entire archive of the Institute and all the inventory books of the manuscript collections also remained in Lwów. In Wroclaw, on the other hand, numerous theatrical items were kept, as well as part of A. Czołowski's collection and the Dzieduszycki Library in Poturzyca.
The location of the Ossolineum in Wroclaw did not change the previous profile of the manuscript collection.
