Current activities

In the presence of Bernd Sibler, the Bavarian State Minister of Sciences, Research and the Arts, the analogue photographic archive of the magazine STERN is presented for the first time today at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), with a number of former STERN photographers taking part as well. Moreover, a small selection of photographs is shown. The Hamburg publishing house Gruner + Jahr donated the analogue photographic archive of the magazine STERN, which comprises 15 million photographs, to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek at the start of 2019, in order to ensure the long-term existence of the archive and to make it accessible to the public and research.

The Center for Electronic Publishing (ZEP) of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has activated a document server on contemporary history – for the time being in a beta version – in cooperation with the Institute for Contemporary History Munich – Berlin (IfZ). Many publications of the IfZ are accessible here in the open-access format as of now.

Since July 2019, researchers have been enabled obtain access to the extensive source database "Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War" following individual registration with the Specialised Information Service for Historical Studies.

The services for recent acquisitions of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek have been technically and functionally modernized as of 1 July 2019. For the subject areas of historical and classical studies, music and Eastern Europe, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek now offers three new services on topical books and other new acquisitions forming part of its collections.

Using the English-language manuscript Cod.angl. 2 as an example, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek demonstrates the innovative features of the technology of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF, pronounced as "triple I F") in a pilot project: In the digitized image, the text of the handwritten logbook entries from the 16th century is laid over the image accurately, and can thus be read line by line in modern script (transcript).