Our library history intertwines with the restoring of the Hebrew settlements on the old land of Israel, the Zionist movement and the modern state of Israel. The desire to collect the written history of the Hebrew people in a national library, on its ancestral place, was expressed as far back as 1872. But the Midrash Abrabanel Library was founded only in 1892 by Jerusalem Lodge of B’nai Brith, a Hebrew fraternal international organization, in cooperation with a group of scholars and intellectuals. From the very beginning of its establishment the National Library had a complicated history. In 1925 it was transferred to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which had just been opened, and entitled the Hebrew National and University Library. When the Israel’s War of Independence started the library was evacuated to the central Jerusalem. In 1960, it was moved to the building where it is located nowadays, on the Edmond J. Safra campus of Hebrew University in the Givat Ram sector of Jerusalem. The National Library was founded on the basis of the heritage of the Hebrew National and University Library. The library owns about five million documents. Besides the collections of books on the Hebrew population and other subjects, it also contains ancient manuscripts, rare printed books and incunabula, special collections of maps, newspapers, music, posters, microfilms, and copies of the manuscripts which could be found in other places. The library catalog is now part of the OCLC Worlcat, and includes local records in Hebrew, Arabic and Cyrillic scripts. The library’s collections are being largely digitized. Nowadays a significant number of books, manuscripts, maps and other mass media are freely available online.