The Ossolineum is located in Wrocław since 1947. It was founded in 1817 by Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński of the Topór coat of arms, politician, writer and researcher who devoted his life to building and cataloguing an extremely rich library collection, the second in the country when it comes to size after the Jagiellonian Library of Kraków. The history of Ossolineum goes back to the foreign Partitions of Poland in the 19th century. The institute along with its library was built intentionally as one of the most important national and Polish cultural institutions at a time when the sovereign Poland could not exist. It first opened its doors to the public in 1827 in Lwów.