The Jagiellonian Library and Wikipedia

On August 6, 2024, I visited the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow, a city in southern Poland. The Jagiellonian Library is the library of Jagiellonian University, the oldest university in Poland. Like the university, the library was founded in the mid-14th century. I had wanted to visit it for about 40 years, and thanks to Wikipedia, I was able to fulfill that dream this time. 

I first learned about this library in the 1980s through a nonfiction book called “Paperchase” by Nigel Lewis. The book describes how during World War II, a valuable collection from the Berlin State Library was evacuated to the East to escape the destruction during the war, and how it ended up in the Jagiellonian Library after a series of twists and turns. The collection consisted of 500 boxes of manuscripts, including music manuscripts by Mozart and Beethoven. Although a small portion of the collection was later returned, the majority of it remained in Poland, as told in the book.

In 1993, I had the opportunity to visit Berlin and also went to the Berlin State Library. The catalogue of the exhibition I saw there said that the situation had not changed and that the collection was still in the Jagiellonian Library. The Berlin Wall was gone at that time, but I wondered if it would take much more time for the various circumstances surrounding the war to change.

In 2024 I had the opportunity to visit Poland to participate in Wikimania. While preparing for the conference, I re-read the book and many things about Poland jumped out at me that I could not remember before. This is thanks to Wikipedia and Wikidata,  tools that did not exist in the 20th century. It used to be very difficult for a non-researcher to look up Polish proper nouns, but now I have it all at my fingertips.

The person that most interested me was the Polish art historian Karol Estreicher. In 1944, he published a book titled “Poland’s Cultural Losses: An Index of Polish Cultural Losses During the German Occupation, 1939–1944,” arguing that German manuscript books should replace with Polish lost cultural artifacts. I translated the article about him from the English Wikipedia into Japanese and added the contents of “Paperchase” to the sources. I also translated the “Jagiellonian Library” article from its English version.

As the date of my departure for Poland approached, I learned from the Jagiellonian Library’s website that library tours were available, and I requested a tour through the library’s e-mail address. Soon, I received a reply and was offered a tour on August 6, the date I had requested. They asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to see, so I requested the music manuscripts.

I arrived in Krakow on the night of August 5 and headed to the Jagiellonian Library the next morning. The library was located in the middle of a lush green cityscape, and although it was during the summer vacation and students were sparse, I was impressed by the majestic building. A young English-speaking librarian was in charge of guiding me around the library, and a veteran joined us halfway through the tour, giving me directions throughout the spacious building. They also carefully showed me the shelves where the Berlin collection is housed. As the library is moving with the times, the collections are digitized and available to researchers around the world.

Next, we moved to the Music Department, where the librarian in charge of rare books gave me an explanation of the collection. She then showed me music manuscripts by Chopin, Mozart, and Beethoven. I was deeply impressed by the library’s willingness to show its valuable collections to me, a visitor and non-researcher. Libraries today are undergoing great changes with the advent of digitization, but I was able to see the great results of this change at the library in the ancient city of Krakow, and my long-standing concerns simply disappeared.