Danish National Library Authority

The Danish National Library Authority (Danish: Biblioteksstyrelse) is an inter-disciplinary public and research library institution and an independent agency under the Danish Ministry of Culture. It is the Danish government's central administrative and advisory body to the public libraries and the research libraries as well as the administrative authority for the Danish law no. 340, Act on library activities (Lov om Biblioteksvirksomhed) of May 17, 2000, and the amendment, law no. 30 of January 10, 2005.

The ideal aim of the institution is at any time to ensure the optimal exploitation of resources and the development of the cooperative Danish library service across municipal and governmental sectors.

The institution’s primary administrative task is to administrate a number of grants and pools to authors, via the Public Lending Right scheme, special libraries or projects, to be responsible for standards, including cataloguing and classification, and to develop national services like bibliotek.dk, the national webbased search-, request- and ordering facility.

Apart from the administration of Act on library activities, the institution has no formal executive power in relation to the libraries, but runs for the most part its development tasks on the basis of grants given to projects which pursue the development of new services or as temporary strategic grants.