National Library of Mongolia

Overview

The National Library of Mongolia, located in the Sükhbaatar District of Ulaanbaatar, is the largest and oldest library in the country, holding over three million books and publications, including roughly one million rare and valuable books, sutras, and manuscripts.

History

The library was officially established on November 19, 1921, under the auspices of the Scientific Committee of Mongolia, a decision taken at the government's 24th meeting just four months after the Outer Mongolian Revolution of July 1921. Originally called the Institute of Sutra and Scripts, its founding collection consisted of just 2,000 books donated by Mongolian scholar Tseven. The library's first reading room opened on November 24, 1923. Before World War II the library worked only with Soviet libraries, later expanding cooperation to other communist-bloc countries beginning with Hungary in 1948 and Bulgaria in 1963; by 1965 it collaborated with libraries in 26 countries. A hall of scientific literature opened in 1963, and a museum dedicated to rare and valuable books was established in 1981. The library joined IFLA in 1991. A new library building was commissioned in 2024, with the collection relocated from the old building that April.

Collections, Holdings, and Publications

The library's holdings include historical materials in Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, and Chinese, and it holds the world's only surviving copies of many ancient Buddhist texts, including editions of the Kanjur (108 volumes, comprising more than 1,260 works) and Tanjur (226 volumes). Much of this Buddhist manuscript collection was assembled from the mid-1960s through the 1980s, gathered from families who had hidden the texts during the Buddhist purge that destroyed nearly every monastery in the country; a project to digitally catalogue the collection began in 1999 with the New York-based Asia Classic Input Project. The Tibetan collection alone holds over 40,000 volumes of manuscripts and woodblock prints, with a digital preservation initiative underway since 2018 in partnership with the Asian Legacy Library and the Buddhist Digital Resource Center. In 2011, with World Bank support, the library launched the "Messenger for the People" (Ardyn Elch) program delivering books to nomadic populations, yurt-district residents, the military, prisoners, and others.

Access and Usage

The library today maintains a book exchange program with roughly 100 libraries in about 70 countries, a United Nations depository reading room, and computer access to the internet.