News archive

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek supports the free digital access to specialist literature in the field of classical studies. It is planned to make the 85 already published volumes of the series "Millennium-Studien" (De Gruyter) freely accessible on the Internet. The ten new publications scheduled for publishing during the two-year project term (2021 – 2022) will be accessible in open access right from the time of publication.

The database contains news reports about apartheid from South Africa and from around the world. The reports include transcripts of radio and television broadcasts as well as articles from newspapers. The reports were chosen by a U.S. government agency called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which became part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1947, to be disseminated among government officials and decision-makers.

As an extensive online streaming portal for classical music, the Naxos Music Library offers access to around 157,000 classical CDs. The portal includes the complete catalogue of Naxos’s own label and over 940 additional independent labels. More than 800 albums are added every month.

A generous donation by the association of musical artists Tonkünstlerverband Augsburg-Schwaben e. V. expands the music-historical holdings of the State and City Library Augsburg by a versatile collection of music materials by numerous musicians and composers from Augsburg and Swabia from four centuries.

The film collection "Socialism on Film" comprises documentary films and motion pictures, weekly newsreels and feature films created in the states of the Eastern Bloc, but also in Spain, China, Vietnam or Cuba. It is important for studies of East and South-East Europe, since it gives insights into all aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, thus documenting audio-visually the period from the Russian Revolution up to the end of the Cold War.

The Daily Reports of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) constitute a history documentation of importance for the USA, covering more than half a century (1941 – 1996). They are considered as a first-class collection of sources on decades of eventful world history.

Starting with the refugee streams during the Second World War, the database covers all crises up to 1996. It contains news reports and transcripts from television and radio broadcasts from all over the world, which were selected by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

The OPACplus/BSB catalogue now provides a new function forming part of the "Advanced search" mode, which can support your search, for example when specifications are incomplete. For the search categories "Title", "Author name" and “Subject (heading)", an autocomplete function has been implemented, which offers a selection of proposals with respect to your specifications input in these fields.

The Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Culture and the Bavarian State Ministry for the Family, Employment and Social Affairs have started the common reading-out initiative vorlesen.zuhören.bewegen (read.listen.move) this year, which is intended to run for a duration of several years. The goal of the initiative is to start a joint long-term campaign to raise awareness of the importance of reading and reading out to somebody.

In cooperation with the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, around 80 music manuscripts from the early times of music notation up to the middle of the 17th century from the holdings of the State and City Library Augsburg will be catalogued and digitized as of November 2020.

Provided via the Specialised Information Service Biodiversity Research with the support of the German Research Foundation, the collection includes e-books on the focal subjects of botany, oncology, entomology, nematology, perception and behaviour and zoology in general.

Cooperation between the Ministry of the Arts and the Bavarian Library Association – Minister of the Arts Sibler: "Contribution to a modern and innovative library landscape in the Free State". On 21 October 2020, Minister of the Arts Bernd Sibler and the Chairman of the Bavarian Library Association (BBV), Dr. Gerhard Hopp, MdL, signed a cooperation agreement with respect to the newly created Bavarian Library Award, which will be awarded for the first time in 2021. All public libraries governed by municipal and church bodies can apply for the competition.

The journal "Voennaja Mysl'" has been published under the auspices of the Ministry of Defence since its first issue. The Chiefs of Staff are directly responsible for creating the journal. With the start of the Cold War, access to the journal became limited to generals, admirals and other high-ranking officers. For the broad public, as well as researchers from the western world, the journal became available again only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The "Bibliotheksmagazin" is published three times per year to report about the collections, activities and services of the state libraries in Berlin and Munich. In addition to three printed issues per year, the Bibliotheksmagazin is also published online.

As of 5 October 2020, the book collection and book return, the registration and the information services on the ground floor will be open up to 19:00 again. We are pleased that we can take a further step towards fulfilling your demands with this service enhancement.

In a feature highly worth seeing, the NDR TV channel reports about the Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek which will now take over the life’s work of the Flensburg photo journalist Dirk Hentschel.

The current issue 3/2020 of the journal Bibliotheksforum Bayern presents itself in an attractive new layout. Also available online – come and have a look! From the "library as a place of learning" to the "bee library" or the "open library", there are many exciting specialist articles and news about public and academic librarianship in Bavaria and in Germany.

The database "African American Newspapers" provides access to over 350 US newspapers and thereby unique records from the African-American history, culture and everyday life over one and a half centuries, from 1827 to 1998. Accordingly, it also constitutes source material for disciplines such as studies of culture, literature, social history, ethnology and others.

With the article and review database ARTOS, the portal osmikon has been providing for a short time now a further search tool for interdisciplinary search on Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in the field of humanities. Initially accessible only via osmikon/osmikonSEARCH as one of the data sources, ARTOS has now received its own search interface and additionally provides an attractive subscription service.

The Literaturportal Bayern, an online platform for literature hosted by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, has given the interested public an understanding of the literature country Bavaria for seven years now. We are opening up also for a younger target group now by processing articles of the literature portal dynamically for Instagram.

In order to keep the public informed about interesting topics and findings from research also in a time without events on site, the German Research Foundation and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek have taken to presenting events in the virtual space. We are starting with the exkurs papers by Prof. Dr. Christian Laforsch and Prof. Dr. Susanne Crewell.

The Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies has acquired the digital archive of the "Novoe Russkoe Slovo" – the most important printed medium of Russian emigrants in the USA – with the support of the German Research Foundation. The archive comprises around 260,000 PDF pages which can be searched in full-text mode.

Recently, access has been enabled for researchers in Germany and at German institutes abroad to the digitized archive of the weekly journal "Moscow News" (1930 – 2014) and its short-lived sister publication "Moscow Daily News" (1932 – 1938). The source collection has been licensed by the Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies with the support of the German Research Foundation.

In its annual report, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek regularly reports about the library's development in the preceding year, with images and texts that will – hopefully – catch your attention and pique your curiosity with regard to the offers and services of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) preserves an extensive collection of most valuable manuscripts and printed works. A selection of 400 important works, which form part of the unique written cultural heritage of Bavaria, has now been made available online at the cultural portal bavarikon. The access to the cultural treasures has been designed to be particularly user-friendly for laypersons, giving an insight into the collection without requiring any prior knowledge. A large part of the manuscripts and printed books in addition has extensive descriptions in German and in English.

The new virtual exhibition at the cultural portal bavarikon illustrates how a piece of paper became one of the most important means of payment. Exhibits from five centuries give an introduction to the history of paper money. The exhibition informs about the function, production and design of paper money in the course of time.

For seven years, the Literaturportal Bayern, a digital platform managed by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, has been tasking itself with making the literary life in Bavaria in all its diversity visible online in the form of essays, blog entries, encyclopaedic articles, excursions and event notifications. The texts now find their way out of the Internet and into print in the form of a volume of their own.

The manuscript collection of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek records the addition of precious items: A total of three high-ranking German-language manuscripts of Bavarian origin could be acquired at the same time for the library from the antiquarian book trade. After conservatory treatment by the library’s own Institute of Conservation and Restoration and cataloguing, they are now being digitized and will be made available for academic research subsequently.

A recently acquired convolute of around 700 Tibetan manuscripts comes from Mongolia, which is influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. Against the background of the fact that Mongolia experienced a serious cultural setback during the time of communism up to 1990 and many monasteries, temples and Buddhist cultural goods were destroyed, the preservation of these manuscripts is noteworthy.

Some 88,000 copyright-free books from the collection of Augsburg State and City Library, dating from the 16th to the 19th century, can be found and consulted in full text worldwide, free of charge, and without any restrictions, via the library's online catalogue or WorldCat: Zoological works, travel reports, biographies, novels, scientific or medical prints, historical treatises, theological tomes, and much more.