NSK Doors Open Days 2025

Visit the National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) on 19 and 20 February 2025 as part of this year’s NSK Doors Open Days programme and find out everything about the invaluable treasures of Croatian and world cultural and scientific heritage preserved in our collections.

Traditionally ushering in the celebration of the National and University Library in Zagreb Day, NSK Day, this year’s NSK Doors Open Days programme will spotlight NSK’s manuscript holdings.

Also, it will offer special guided tours of the Library and an interesting workshop programme. The tours, which everyone interested in need to apply for at informacijski.centar@nsk.hr, will be organised at 11.00, 14.00 and 17.00, while workshops, for which no registration is needed, will be held from 12.00 and 18.00.

Welcome to NSK, (all) our doors are wide open!

Tours spotlighting NSK’s manuscript treasures

Apart from taking the visitors through the greater part of the Library’s 44,432 square metres, presenting the most interesting stories from its long history and about its rich collections, the 2025 NSK Doors Open Days tours will reveal some of the greatest treasures in NSK’s most valuable collections.

At the NSK Manuscripts and Old Books Collection, along with the Collection’s oldest manuscripts the visitors will be able to see the autographs of August Šenoa, Antun Gustav Matoš, Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić and other greats of Croatian literature. Some of the most valuable cartographic material from the 18^th and 19^th centuries will be displayed at the NSK Map Collection, including the 1846, first ever plan of Maksimir, a major attraction of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, its monument of landscape architecture and the first public park in south-eastern Europe, as well as the 1790 map of the siege of the Novi Zrin fortress on the eve of the battle between the Turk Ottomans and the Habsburg forces led by commander Laudon.

The staff of the NSK Music Collection will present the manuscripts of the greatest Croatian composers such as Vatroslav Lisinski, who composed the first Croatian opera (Ljubav i zloba; “Love and Malice”, 1845), and Ivan Zajc (1832-1914), but also of the contemporary composers such as Silvio Foretić and Miroslav Miletić. The drawings by Ljubo Babić, Slava Raškaj, Milan Trenc and other famous names of Croatian visual arts will be put on display at the NSK Print Collection.

From cataloguing to conservation – workshops revealing the secrets of library work

In the 2025 NSK Doors Open Days workshops the visitors will again have the opportunity to learn more about various book conservation techniques and try them out themselves under the expert guidance of the conservation and preservation specialists from the NSK Preservation and Storage Department.

Also, a workshop revealing how library professionals organise millions and millions of library resources and make them available and easy to find will bring closer to the visitors the secrets of library cataloguing and bibliographic description.

Finally, in the NSK Doors Open Days chill-out corner the visitors will have the opportunity to relax by enjoying the NSK colouring pages with motifs from the titles in the NSK collections, doing crosswords from the historical Croatian newspapers or browsing through the NSK titles which the Library will be donating to the visitors as part of its Books, a perfect gift programme.