Current activities

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek takes part in the current discussion among historians about setting up a national research data infrastructure. The BSB welcomes the impulses coming from the Council for Information Infrastructures (Rat für Informationsinfrastrukturen, RfII), calling for the establishment of a distributed, networked research data infrastructure (NFDI) in its second paper of March 2018 among other things, and, in the sense formulated by the RfII, understands "cooperation as an opportunity".

The new central portal for the services of the Specialised Information Service for Historical Studies has been launched: beta.historicum.net. The portal offers access to digital services for historians. Among these are research tools, licenses usable on a supra-regional level, the Deutsche Historische Bibliografie and various subject-related portals, such as one on the history of technology.

The portal "The First World War" contains a large number of primary sources on the First World War, such as photographs, letters, flyers, caricatures and much more. It is complemented by a number of further services, such as time lines, interactive map materials, case studies, etc. These allow placing the digitized sources into a broader context.

Historians and everybody interested in regional history can use the research platform "recensio.regio – Review Platform for Regional History" as of now. The portal offers access to reviews of regional-historical specialist journals, constituting a primary point of access for information on recent publications about regional history in the German language. The reviews of the cooperating journals are available to the users in full-text search mode. The platform can be accessed freely and free of charge.

Since the end of October, the Specialised Information Service (FID) for Historical Studies has offered access to the database "Conditions and Politics in Occupied Western Europe, 1940 – 1945", which forms part of the Archives Unbound Collection of Gale Cengage, to the Germany-wide expert community for a three-month trial period. So far, the database has been available only at two German libraries. A FID license will be negotiated in case of a sufficient frequency of use by researchers.