Even though the world is quickly moving to digital information, libraries will have an important role in the future as well. Information can easily be transferred via the Internet, ebooks can be loaned from the home town library to the home computer, but the physical place where experts of information (librarians) are ready to help continues to be invaluable.

The oldest and largest libraries have collected books and other documents for centuries, and it shows. The biggest library of the world, the British Library in London has 170 million items in its collections. The second largest, the Library of Congress in Washington DC, US, has archived 158 million items. The third biggest, the Library and Archive Canada in Ottawa has 54 million items.

As one might expect, big countries like the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan have the greatest resources to run an operation that requires so much space and expertise as a big library or archive requires. Yet, two small Scandinavian countries, Denmark and Sweden, have libraries that take them to the top 20 list of the world’s biggest libraries. Here is the full top 20 list.

Infographic by Instascribe.