The Picture Archive of the Austrian National Library is Austria’s biggest location of pictorial documentation. The holdings of the Archives unite three historical collections: the Portrait Collection, the Picture Archives, and the Imperial Family Fidei commis Library.
The Map Department administers about 290,000 maps, 45,000 geographic-topographic views, 800.000 picture postcards, 650 globes, 100 reliefs and models of fortresses, and about 81,000 volumes of technical literature and atlases.
The Department of Music of the Austrian National Library is Austria’s biggest musical archives, and at the same time a modern scholarly research library and the place where most valuable original musical manuscripts are kept.
The Austrian Literary Archives gathers lifetime and posthumous bequests of Austrian authors beginning with the 20th century (especially after 1945) and makes them available for scholarly research.
The Papyrus Collection with its 180.000 objects is one of the largest in the world. In October 2001 the Collection was included in UNESCO's list "Memory of the World" as a world documentation heritage site.
Since its founding in 1927 the Esperanto Museum has had a comprehensive library, which in 1990 received the title of Department of Planned Languages.
In April 2008 the “Department of Manuscripts, Autographs and Closed Collections” and the “Department of Incunabula, Old and Rare Books” were joined. Use of the holdings takes place in the Augustinian reading room.
The Central Archives of Austrian Folk Song, now a section of the Austrian National Library, contains documents of musical and poetic expression. It has many hand-written records of texts and melodies and possesses Austria’s biggest holdings of books and reviews on the topics of folk song, folk dance, and folk poetry.