Current activities

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.

After you have logged in on the web page of our booking system, you can now view and manage your bookings in a newly designed overview.

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.

A five-volume Torah edition, which was printed in Fürth between 1801 and 1803 and formerly owned by the famous Jewish Munich citizen Schalom Ben-Chorin (1913 – 1999), could now be purchased by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek to expand its collection of rare Hebrew Bavarica.

In the course of the coming three years, the German Research Foundation will fund the development of a union catalogue and of a portal "Orient-Digital" for oriental manuscripts. It is intended to establish common cataloguing standards, to convert printed catalogues into electronic ones and to pool all existing electronic catalogue entries. Under the direction of the Oriental Department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Gotha Research Library, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich and the University Computation Center (URZ) Leipzig will be cooperating closely.