Specialised information service

Since 1949, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has supported the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek as reference library for the research of Eastern Europe in Germany. Between 1949 and 2015, this took place within the framework of the funding programme for special collection areas, "Sondersammelgebiete", and since 2016 the programme of Specialised Information Services for Science and Scholarship, "Fachinformationsdienste für die Wissenschaft", has been pursued.

The Specialised Information Service (FID) for East, Central and Southeast European Studies provides an infrastructure for the research of Eastern Europe in the fields of humanities and social sciences. The broad spectrum of services in the domain of scholarly literature and information provision is expanded continuously in close coordination with the expert community.

Further information about the Specialised Information Service for East, Central and Southeast European Studies
DFG support programme "Fachinformationsdienste für die Wissenschaft"

Within the framework of the Specialised Information Service, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek acquires around 18,000 monographs and collective works annually, as well as several thousand journals and a broad spectrum of electronic media from Eastern Europe and about the region. Descriptive and subject cataloguing is carried out for the entire literature. As a special service, tables of contents and abstracts (since 2006) and bibliographies and registers (since 2016) are provided in digital form. Not only do they offer a "first glance at the contents", but they are also incorporated in the search, thereby offering systematic and frequently also multilingual search access points.
The service "New Books and More on Eastern Europe" enables you comfortably to keep up with the books newly arriving at the library.

New Books and More on Eastern Europe

One of the core tasks of the Specialised Information Service is the Germany-wide provision of the acquired research literature. This service is highly sought after: Around 13,000 monographs from and about Eastern Europe and a similar number of articles are circulated by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek within the scope of national interlibrary loan every year. Articles from electronic journals and e-books are also made available via interlibrary loan.

Do you have a particular acquisition request or a recommendation for us? Within the scope of the FID profile, we appreciate receiving your requests and indications.

Communicate requests  |  FID profile

To cover the peak demand of German Eastern-Europe research, the Specialised Information Service for East, Central and Southeast European Studies acquires licenses for location-independent access to digital resources that come at a charge. The focus is on extensive full-text archives.

Licensed databases and conditions of use

With ARTOS – the articles and review database on Eastern Europe – the Specialised Information Service, in Germany-wide cooperation with subject-centred libraries and specialist libraries from the field of Eastern-Europe research, offers a further research tool for interdisciplinary studies of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe with respect to humanities and social sciences.

Within the scope of ARTOS, a subscription service – ARTOS AboService – is available, which offers two subscription options: In addition to a topic-related subscription, also a classic journal subscription can be taken out. Currently, around 250 relevant specialist journals are taken into account.

ARTOS – Artikel und Rezensionen zu Ost-, Ostmittel- und Südosteuropa 
(ARTOS – Articles and Book Reviews on Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe)
ARTOS AboService 
(ARTOS alerting service)
Further information on the articles database ARTOS

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek supports the open-access idea. Around 80,000 titles from the Eastern Europe collection have already been made freely accessible in digital form. Continuing the DFG-supported project OstDok (2009 – 2015), the Specialised Information Service for East, Central and Southeast European Studies provides the technical infrastructure for electronic secondary publications of printed monographs, collective works and journals from the field of Eastern-Europe research. In cooperation with research institutes and Eastern-Europe experts, also the provision of originally electronic publication series and online topic dossiers is expanded continuously.

Further information about the FID's services in the field of electronic publishing

Among the fundamentally new scholarly postulates there are the sustainable reproducibility of research processes and the option to re-use collected data. The Specialised Information Service supports the Eastern-Europe research in Germany in the fields of humanities and social sciences in setting up a high-performance research data management, developing the infrastructural basis for the digital publication and long-term archiving of research data.

Further information about the FID's services in the field of research data management

The Specialised Information Service for East, Central and Southeast European Studies keeps you informed with a newsletter and extensive services on Twitter, as well as a blog. Here, you can find information about interesting books, digital or printed collections of sources and materials, newly licensed databases and research tools, freshly published research data, courses, events and other relevant dates, new services and much more.

Newsletter: Information and registration
Archive of the newsletter

Twitter
Blog

Since June 2018, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has been providing a new research gateway on central, eastern and southeastern Europe. osmikon pools the services of the Specialised Information Service, and, in cooperation with other institutions, offers a broad information spectrum for interdisciplinary research on eastern Europe.

The core of the portal is the central search access point osmikonSEARCH, which allows for simultaneously searching multiple databases for specialist literature and research materials on central, eastern and southeastern Europe.

osmikon
osmikonSEARCH
Further information on osmikon

To support teaching, the Specialised Information Service for East, Central and Southeast European Studies makes available tutorials on information literacy, which are intended, among other things, as online teaching materials for autonomous use by students and postgraduate students, but also as a support tool for research, independently of courses. In addition, introductions are offered to important current topics, such as research data management. The tutorials are continuously expanded and improved.

To the tutorials

The Specialised Information Service for East, Central and Southeast European Studies is accompanied and advised in its work by an advisory board of scholars. The current board members are: