Árbók Landsbókasafns Íslands - Nýr flokkur - 01.01.1993, Blaðsíða 103

ENGLISH SUMMARY
103
Þorsteinsson (1781—1876) at Arnarstapi in the West of Iceland. The letters are
preserved in the National Library but Bjarni Þorsteinsson’s letters to Sveinbjörn
Egilsson have apparently been lost.
As for the contents of the letters, they touch on many different subjects. Being
letters between friends, personal news and discussions of interests they had in
common such as poetry are most prominent. The school is frequently mentioned
and there is a considerable discussion in several letters of Sveinbjörn Egilsson’s
edition of his father-in-law’s book of poetry, which Bjarni Þorsteinsson criticized
severely in a letter to his friend.
Landsbókasafnið 1992 [a reportj. Landsbókasafn íslands. Árbók. Nýr flokkur 18
(1992). Rv. 1993, pp. 86-100.
At the end of the year, the number of printed books in the National Library
was, according to the accessions catalogue 430,473 volumes, the annual increase
being 7234 volumes. The library acquired a great number of books through gifts
and exchanges (cf. a list of donors and exchange partners on pp. 86-88); a list of
those who gave manuscripts is on pp. 88-91.
The fourth supplementary volume of th Catalogue of Manuscripts in the
Department of Manuscripts (Skrá um handritasöfn Landsbókasafnsins) is now
being prepared for publication. Considerable progress was made during the year
in making the cataloguing records of Icelandic publications available in Gegnir,
the library system of the National Library and the University Library. Records of
publications after 1973 are now part of the system and work is in progress on
correcting entries and on retrospective cataloguing. The cumulative volume of
the Icelandic National Bibliography for the years 1979-1983 was published
during the year.
The library was closed to visitors for three weeks in June while most of the staff
worked on attaching barcode labels to books in the Department of Foreign
Literature. It is estimated that about half of the foreign literature in the library
had got a bar-code by the end of the year.
Work on the new National and University Library building progressed well
during the year. A total of 335 million Icelandic kronas was allocated to the
construction in 1992.