Press archive

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek receives the personal papers of Eugen Roth (1895 – 1976), one of the best-known German lyricists of the 20th century. The personal papers of the Munich-born author include, among other things, the manuscripts of his printed and unprinted works, press articles, diaries and his correspondence. The personal papers of Eugen Roth constitute one of the most important recent acquisitions of the library’s collection of personal papers.

Rafael Seligmann donates his entire literary work to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The pre-death estate includes, in addition to his literary work, also over 2,000 articles, essays, reviews of his books, television plays, radio shows, interviews, his correspondence with personalities from political and cultural life, as well as numerous personal documents. The donation constitutes an important asset for the library’s extensive collections of personal papers of 20th-century authors, which include, i.a., Werner Bergengruen, Oskar Maria Graf and Hermann Lenz.

The analogue photo archive of the journal stern with its 15 million prints, negatives and slides is considered as the visual memory of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1948 to 2001. Having acquired the archive in the year 2019, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek now makes the one millionth digitized picture available online in the specially set up portal www.stern-Fotoarchiv.de.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) and the Saxon Regional Library – State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) have started the fifth phase of the Fachinformationsdienst (FID) Musikwissenschaft (Specialised Information Service for Musicology), a project subsidised by the German Research Foundation since 2014 and now extended by a further three years. The funding volume of the 5th phase amounts to around 2.4 million euros. The objective of the infrastructure project is to provide relevant information services for research in musicology in Germany. In the course of the coming three years, the BSB and the SLUB thus will further expand their already established services.

An initial 21,000 pictures of the photographer Isolde Ohlbaum are already available online – in the new picture portal of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The photographer Isolde Ohlbaum is one of the most famous chroniclers of the national and international literary and artistic scenes. Since the 1970s, she has specialized on portraits of authors in particular. At fotoarchiv-ohlbaum.bsb-muenchen.de the pictures of the artist can now be viewed, searched and licensed.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has launched a new web service for researchers, the BSBlab. The BSBlab is the central point to go to for everybody wanting to use the digital resources of the library for experimentation or analysis. Interfaces to meta data are offered, data tools and other tools are presented, and curated data collections are provided in order to facilitate research on and with the data. An extra area is dedicated to the material-scientific and art-technological research at the Institute of Conservation of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The new service is being set up currently. The BSBlab will be further developed and expanded continuously.

bavarikon, Bavaria's digital treasure trove, wants to establish a particularly low-threshold access to history and culture with a new editorial service: An extra website, bavarikon4u.de, was set up for this purpose, where brief, entertaining contents are offered in easily understandable form. The objective is to facilitate access to the world of art and culture particularly for a younger public.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has just activated an image-based similarity search for bavarikon, Bavaria's digital treasure vault. The development from the library's own Munich Digitization Center (MDZ) searches through over three million image segments in the portal from photos, graphics, paintings and illustrations recognized through machine learning. At www.bavarikon.de/imagesimilarity, everybody interested in culture can search for motifs quickly and efficiently now, or can enjoy drifting from one image to another.

"WEITER WISSEN. Mit uns." – "KNOW MORE. With us." is the motto of a campaign initiated by a number of important scholarly libraries to raise awareness of their unique work for scholarship and society.

From 20 October 2023 to 4 February 2024, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and Max Dudler present the exhibition "Max Dudler – Building for books" in the grand staircase and the Fürstensaal. Showcasing architecture models, plans and competition concepts, the exhibition approaches the work of the architect Max Dudler in the field of library construction from various angles. Photographs, films and listening stations make a visit to the exhibition a multimedia experience.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek recently acquired one of the world's most famous works of art, the "Great Wave" by Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849). "Under the Wave off Kanagawa", which is the actual title of the coloured woodblock print, was created by Hokusai in the years 1830/32. The work forms part of his presumably most famous series of woodblock prints, the "36 views of Mount Fuji". It could be acquired from a private collection for a price in the lower 7-digit range. The print forms the conclusion and at the same time apex of a series of acquisitions of works by Hokusai by the library in the course of the past months.

The cultural portal bavarikon presents its new appearance on time for its tenth anniversary. Bavaria's digital treasure vault has revised its website and, at bavarikon.de, offers an optically and functionally improved access to the world of art, culture and gems of knowledge from Bavarian museums, archives and libraries.

Around 300 musicologists meet in Munich from 24 to 28 July at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, the largest musicological conference in Europe.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek could again expand its Japanese collection by an outstanding work by Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849). The new acquisition is the famous coloured woodblock print "South wind, clear sky", better known as "Red Fuji".

Two important manuscripts by the Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207 – 1273) have been entered in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. The two works – from the holdings of the State Library of Berlin and of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek – form part of a joint application encompassing a total of 15 manuscripts, which was filed by six countries under the lead of the Turkish UNESCO Commission.

The stern Photo Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has been launched online. The library thus makes one of the most important visual archives of the Federal Republic accessible to the public. At stern-fotoarchiv.de the first 250,000 pictures of the total of around 15 million pictures are available for scholars, the public and commercial use. The portal is under construction and is expanded continuously.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has managed to complement its extensive Japanese collection by an outstanding work: The woodblock print "Thunderstorm in the foothills of the Fuji" by Katsushika Hokusai (1760 – 1849), the great master of Japanese coloured woodblock printing, could be bought from a Japanese private collection.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek acquires the entire photographic work of Isolde Ohlbaum from 1970 up to the present, composed of black-and-white negatives, coloured slides and image files. The archive also includes voluminous correspondence with portrayed persons of the literary and cultural life. With this outstanding document of photography of Germany, the library further expands its already extensive Image Archive, which is the largest of its kind held by any public-sector institution in Germany. The transition of the archive to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek takes place in four parts up to the end of 2025.

The Joint Science Conference of the Federal State and the Laender took a decision on the applications of the third call for tender round for the national research data infrastructure (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur, NFDI) at their meeting on 4 November 2022. The consortium NFDI4Memory coordinated under the lead of the Leibniz Institute for European History, Mainz, was approved.

More than 3,000 volumes are comprised by the top-class collection of medicine-historical works donated to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek by Prof. Dr. med. Dr. h. c. mult. Gerd Plewig, long-time Director of the Hospital and Polyclinic for Dermatology and Allergology in Munich, and his wife Dr. med. Helga Lincke-Plewig. The so-called "Bibliotheca Historia Dermatologiae" contains important, rare and unique medical printed works from five centuries, among them valuable editions of the work by Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564), anatomist and personal doctor of Emperor Charles V and King Philip II of Spain.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the National Library of Kosova "Pjetër Bogdani" signed a cooperation agreement today, on Friday, 28 October 2022, in the presence of the Bavarian State Minister for Sciences, Research and the Arts, Markus Blume, the Kosovar Minister for Culture, Youth and Sports, Hajrulla Ҫeku, and the Kosovar Consul General in Munich, Afrim Nura. The agreement envisages a closer cooperation of the two institutions in numerous fields of library activities.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has acquired the archive of the photographer Nikolai Molodovsky (1899 – 1986), which includes around 69,000 images. Nikolai Molodovsky documented everyday life in the Bavarian countryside during the time after the war, thereby creating impressive snapshots which frequently tell stories. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek further expands its important Image Archive – the largest of its kind held by any German public-sector institution – by this unique collection of materials from Bavaria.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has just provided online access to its 3-millionth digital copy. The library thus makes the majority of its copyright-free holdings and collections from many centuries available digitally to education, research and the broad public, with the greatest portion being retrievable at digitale-sammlungen.de. The number of three million digitized manuscripts, incunabula, rare printed works, books, newspaper issues, images and special materials corresponds to around 400 million image files, which are available online free of charge anywhere and at any given time. In terms of memory space for long-term archiving, this corresponds to over 1.1 petabytes.

On 1 July 2022, Dr. Sascha Salatowsky assumed the office of Director of the Regional Library of Coburg as the successor of Dr. Silvia Pfister, who had been in this office since 2002.

With its new virtual exhibition "Oktoberfest – History, backgrounds, highlights", bavarikon gets all fans of the "Wiesn" and everybody interested in culture and history in the mood for the 187th Munich Oktoberfest . The Internet portal of the Free State of Bavaria presents over 200 exhibits from twelve Bavarian cultural institutions, thus offering a unique digital stroll across the world’s largest fun fair – online at www.bavarikon.de/oktoberfest.

Qalamos, the portal for manuscripts from Asian and African scriptural tradition, starts on 28 June 2022. The portal pools the metadata and digital copies of manuscripts from this area from over 20 German institutions and makes them publicly accessible together for the first time.

As of next Monday, 2 May, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek extends the opening hours of its reading rooms, thereby surpassing its opening hours before the Covid pandemic. The successful reading-place reservation system will be maintained for all reading rooms.

Since 2019, the State Libraries of Berlin and Munich, the University Library of Leipzig and the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel have been working on setting up the Germany-wide web portal handschriftenportal.de, which pools information on manuscripts from the Middle Ages and from modern times forming part of German collections, in a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The DFG has now approved further funding in the amount of almost five million Euros for a three-year continuation of this innovative endeavour, which is custom-fitted to the demands of researchers and collectors. The area of teaching and research Information Behavior of the Humboldt University in Berlin is a new member of the project group, whose involvement will ensure optimal usability of the newly developed portal.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) opens the photo exhibition "Olympic Games 72 in images. Photographs from the collections of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek" on 11 May 2022. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Olympic Games of 1972, the library takes a look back at the Games and their social, political and cultural dimensions. Most of the images, part of which has not been published before, are from photo collections acquired by the BSB only recently.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek continues the indexing, digitization and setting up of an online presentation of the historical archive of the music publishing house B. Schott’s Söhne. The German Research Foundation (DFG) supports this second project phase with further funding in the amount of around 1.2 million Euro. The archive of the music publishing house seated in Mainz is considered unique among the preserved archives of publishing houses on account of its volume and comprehensiveness. It was entered in the German register of archives of national value (Länderverzeichnis national wertvoller Archive) in 2004.