Manuscripts

The Man­u­script De­part­ment col­lec­tion con­tains more than 340 thou­sand dif­fer­ent doc­u­ments from the 13th to the 21st 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.