Biblioteka Główna AGH, Kraków

Biblioteka Główna AGH is the main academic library of Kraków’s University of Science and Technology, built around the sciences and engineering taught there. Its story begins in the nineteen twenty-one–twenty-two academic year, when the university created a central library; at first, professors alone could use it. Students gained their own reading room in nineteen twenty-three.

The collection grew through gifts from professors and research institutions in Poland and abroad. Marie Skłodowska-Curie helped secure an exchange that brought French scholarly journals here in return for AGH staff publications. By nineteen thirty-eight, the library held seventeen thousand one hundred and ninety-four volumes.

War cut the holdings by about a quarter, but the surviving collection returned after the conflict. The separate building you see opened in nineteen sixty-six and was Poland’s first modular library building. Today its shelves and specialist holdings span mathematics and physics, mining and metallurgy, computing, robotics, maps, patents, technical standards, and AGH doctoral dissertations. Notice that this is a working part of a technical university: its library has kept changing alongside the disciplines it serves.