The Manuscript Department collection contains more than 340 thousand different documents from the 13th to the 21 century written in Lithuanian, Latin, Polish, Chancery Slavonic, Russian, German, English, Hebrew and other languages. They are divided into 340 archival collections of smaller or larger scope.
A major part of the materials is related to Vilnius University and its history: personal archives of the old university’s professors and modern researchers that span through multiple historical periods, collections of dissertations and theses, materials from ethnographic, folklore and local history expeditions, archives of various fellowships and more. Part of Vytautas Magnus University Library documents, transferred between 1952 and 1953, is also stored here. A fair portion of those documents consists of judicial acts of GDL, documents that bear witness to administrative, pastoral and educational activities of various religious denominations, monasteries and churches as well as their estate documents, fragments from multiple noble and szlachta family archives, papers documenting activities of city administrative offices, workshops and other economic practices, archives of the administrative offices and educational institutions of the governorates that made up the Northwestern Krai of the Russian Empire, editorial boards, fellowships, ecclesiastical institution stacks and special collections: parchments, sheets of music, architectural blueprints, designs, drawings and plot plans.
