From the total amount of approximately 65 million collection items accounted for by Czech museums and galleries, the PNP administers more than one tenth, which represents a significant part of the national cultural heritage.
The collection of the PNP has gradually grown in size and scope since 1952 and was entered in the Central Register of Collections kept by the Czech Ministry of Culture on September 25, 2002, under reference No. PNP/002-05-10/195002, pursuant to Section 3 (2) and Section 17 (2) of the Collections Preservation Act (act No. 122/2000 Coll., as amended).
A major part of the collection of the PNP consists of archive papers and documents stored in the literary archive department; this department qualifies as a public accredited specialist archive under Section 80 et seq. of the Archive and Record-Keeping Act (act No. 499/2004 Coll.). The archive is the most comprehensive corpus of sources for studies of Czech literary history from the 19th and 20th century in the Czech Republic and one of the most important collections in all of Europe.
The collection of PNP is further divided into four subcollections:
- Subcollection "Visual Art" (field reference No. 15)
- Subcollection "Books" (field reference No. 18)
- Subcollection "Correspondence and Prints" (field reference No. 19)
- Subcollection "Others - Ex Librises" (field reference No. 24)
The subcollections Visual Art and Ex Librises (15 and 24) are stored in the art collections department, the subcollections Books, Correspondence and Prints (18 and 19) are stored in the library department.
Under act No. 298/1990 Coll., as amended by act No. 338/1991 Coll., over 200 000 items have so far been released from the PNP depositories to their rightful owners (mostly library depositories and objects of art that originally belonged to monasteries).
