• is charged with the care of and access to materials from the Library's archives and special collections (personal and institutional fonds).

• is a national documentation centre in the area of Swedish music and musical life (formerly  the Swedish Music History Archive). It collects data about and indexes literature, archival collections, images and other holdings in the field of music all over the country.
  
  The Department is open to researchers and the general public alike.
  

There is no limtation as to types or genres of music. There is information about popular music groups, art music and its composers, musical life in specific locales or regions, or in the country as a whole, early and new music,  etc.

The institution was founded in 1965 to cater for research needs for a unified overview and documentation of music source materials and literature in Sweden. It was a part of the Swedish National Collections of Music when that organization was established in 1981. In 1993 it became a unit within the Library, and in  2003 its remit was broadened. In June 2008, the rare collections were incorporated and the department received its present name.

As a documentation centre the department has no real equivalent in other countries but the notion has attracted interest elwewhere, for instance in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands.