Cooperation with the Austrian National Library

The Austrian National Library in Vienna and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich have concluded a cooperation agreement which was signed on 1 February 2012 by the Directors General Dr. Johanna Rachinger and Dr. Rolf Griebel at the Vienna residence of the German Ambassador Hans Henning Blomeyer-Bartenstein.

Both libraries rank among the world's best research and universal libraries, which is impressively confirmed by the sum of their holdings: Together they preserve for posterity around 18 million books and other media that are partly of enormous historical importance. Annually around 200,000 new works are added to their collections. Together they make a total of around 1.6 million copyright-free works available for digitization in cooperation with Google: an innovative form of collection conservation and cataloguing that is unique in the German language area.

Under the cooperation agreement the two institutions plan to intensify their already close strategic cooperation in the future, to coordinate their endeavours regarding important issues such as digitization and to ensure that a know-how exchange takes place in the fields of restoration and collection preservation. The libraries will cooperate not only in the fields of collection development, exhibitions, cataloguing cultural heritage and scholarly research, but also regarding European and international projects such as the virtual library Europeana.

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek – Austrian National Library