Current activities

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek expands its digital services again, launching the newspaper portal digiPress for the presentation of digitized newspapers. Up to the end of the year, the research portal will almost triple in volume: from currently 340 to over 1,000 copyright-free historical newspaper titles.

Titled "Martin Luther and the early Reformation in Bavaria. Supporters, adversaries, sympathisers", the cultural portal bavarikon presents its first virtual exhibition in 2017, the year of the Reformation's anniversary. The exhibition is unique, not only with respect to its volume, but also the approach taken: Twenty-one cultural institutions take part in the virtual exhibition showing 123 high-carat exhibits.

The new digital source collection has been licensed within the framework of the Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies with the support of the German Research Foundation. It pools documents on the activities of US intelligence services in connection with the Soviet Union, showing their successes and failures.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is testing the discovery service Yewno as an additional topical search engine for digital full texts. The software works on the basis of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is the first European institution to make this new search technology available to its users within the framework of a three-month pilot phase. Users can send their feedback to the project team by means of a response form. The service is available at: https://www.bsb-muenchen.de/en/search-and-service/searching-and-finding/yewno/

As of 1 February 2017, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek offers access for one year to the e-books of the full collection of Cambridge University Press, comprising around 32,000 titles. The service on historical studies includes around 2,000 e-books.