News archive

Use our photo stories to take a look at selected images of the exhibition "MUNICH. LOOK here!" and find out about some interesting facts and anecdotes.

bavarikon presents new photograph collections of two partners, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the Tucher'sche Kulturstiftung (Tucher Cultural Foundation). The portal on the arts, culture and regional studies of Bavaria thus now offers around 90,000 high-resolution images inviting you to go on a virtual exploration trip!

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek complements its renowned collection by two very rare works of the Czech artist Josef Váchal (1884 – 1969): "Ďáblova zahrádka, aneb přírodopis strašidel" ("The devil's garden, or the natural history of spirits") of the year 1924 and "Šumava umírající a romantická" ("Bohemian Forest dying and romantical") of 1931. The two impressive, leather-bound folio volumes are illustrated with exquisite coloured wood engravings and rank among the absolute masterpieces of Czech modern art between the two world wars.

The Bibliotheksforum Bayern contains specialised articles and news informing about all areas of public and academic librarianship in Bavaria. A main focus of the current issue is on school libraries.

Minister of the Arts Bernd Sibler: "Providing creators of literature with a forum to stay in contact with their audience and to honour their work." Read more in the press release by the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences and the Arts of 11 June 2020.

The current issue of the journal Bibliotheksmagazin surely holds something for everybody – articles about famous authors, rare printed works, new collections of musicians’ personal papers or inventive artists.

As of 2 June 2020
Cabinet presentation forming part of the series “Musical treasures”
In front of the Reading Room for Music/Maps/Images, the Department of Music shows a cabinet presentation on watermarks in music manuscripts of the 15th and 16th century. The presentation forms the completion point of a DFG-funded cataloguing and thermography project.

The high-quality classificatory subject indexing can now also be used in the OPACplus for thematic searches for academic literature of the past two decades in the subject fields of classical studies, studies of history, musicology and eastern and south-eastern Europe. This constitutes a substantial enhancement of subject-related search possibilities.

With over 630,000 entries, the "Gnomon Bibliographische Datenbank" is one of the most comprehensive and most renowned database systems for specialised literature from the overall field of classical studies, including the subject-specific history of scholarship and science. The migration of the database has now been concluded, a little more than one year after the online launch of the new search interface. Updated on a daily basis, Gnomon provides access to the recorded data which are also incorporated in PropylaeumSEARCH, the central search portal of the Specialised Information Service for Classical Studies.

In the course of the Bavaria-wide loosening of the measures taken due to the corona pandemic, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which had to be closed completely on 17 March, has been re-opened and taken up its services again step by step. Since 25 May, the library has now been offering the majority of its services again.

On 25 May 2020, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek reopens its successful photography exhibition "MUNICH. LOOK here!" for the public. Visitors can then view the 270 exhibits from the historical image archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek with certain limitations – up to and including 31 July 2020 at that.

The Specialised Information Service for Historical Studies has started a newsletter service a short while ago. historicumNEWS informs historians, for example, about literature search in historicumSEARCH or in the Deutsche Historische Bibliografie (German Historical Bibliography), FID licenses available on a supra-regional scale or developments on the platform recensio.regio. Subscribers are additionally kept posted about events and courses.

The provider East View offers free-of-charge access to various online resources for students and researchers up to the end of July of 2020 within the scope of the license held by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The offer runs the gamut from "Pravda" (issues up to December 2019), to "Rossiyskaya Gazeta", "Novaya Gazeta", "The Current Digest of the Russian Press" and "The Current Digest of the Chinese Press", up to the e-book collection "Essential Russian Classics".

In order to support students and teaching during the summer semester 2020, the Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies provides tutorials on information literacy at short notice, which are intended, among other things, as online study materials for independent use by students.

The Research Association for Provenance Research has presented its activity report for 2019, documenting the research work of the 22 participating institutions, among them also the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. In the course of last year, a total of 362 objects could be restituted, 36 research projects could be processed and over 120 notifications of finds could be published.

More than 2,300 German-language textbooks and study literature of the platform utb-studi-e-book can be used electronically via the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek as of now. Access is provided for registered users of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, also in the form of remote access from home.

In the light of the current situation, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is directing its focus more strongly at its digital contents and optimizes its services for users. These services range from a simplified registration process to virtual exhibitions. The library building of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek currently remains closed for visitors. In order to support its users, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek offers numerous digital contents and search possibilities on its web pages. In addition, its services and procedures are being optimized for users.

Even in a time of lockdown and social distancing, bavarikon continues offering the opportunity to experience art and culture without limitation! What is more – we are working on expanding our services continuously and are particularly pleased that we can now make available around 40,000 new content items for you in the extended collection "Books on Bavaria". This means that we have now exceeded the threshold of 300,000 digital copies!

Published continuously since 1917, "Gudok" is one of the oldest and high-ranking specialist journals in Russia. While it started out with small print runs as a journal dedicated predominantly to topics revolving around the railway industry, the journal evolved in the course of time to become a journal of nation-wide coverage due to its increasing popularity.

The platform SAGE Knowledge offers access to English-language e-books, encyclopaedias and reference books of the publishing house SAGE in full-text form, in particular from the fields of humanities and social sciences, including numerous internationally commended titles.

6 March – 21 June 2020
250 historical images from the mid-19th century up to the 1970s invite visitors to go on an exciting journey through time in Munich and its surroundings. The extraordinary photographs are from well-known Munich photographers, such as Franz Hanfstaengl, Georg Fruhstorfer, Felicitas Timpe or Heinrich Hoffmann. The Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which manages the photographic legacies and image archives, offers a representative insight into the institution’s outstanding photograph collections.

DigiLABS, the "Digitaler Literaturatlas von Bayerisch-Schwaben" has been launched online today. Being the only one of its kind within Germany, the digitization project provides a cartography of the literature landscape of the Bavarian part of Swabia. The places of activity of authors from the Bavarian-Swabian region, as well as historical sites of literature can be found marked on a digital map.

Tusculum, near Rome, was the city where Cicero had his country house, which served as his retreat. Tusculum was considered the epitome of leisure and of valuable escapes from a demanding everyday life – and gave its name to the famous book series. The "Sammlung Tusculum" (collection Tusculum) is the most extensive book series on Greek and Latin literature in the German language area.

The website of the Consulting Center for Public Libraries has been submitted to a complex relaunch. The website has been rendered more professional and easy to use by the responsible working group web relaunch in cooperation with the editorial team of the consulting center in charge of the specialised columns and staff members of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

bavarikon newly features around 190 lithographies. These are prints produced in the lithographic printing technique – a method developed in Munich, which revolutionised the reproduction of image materials.

The Specialised Information Service for Historical Studies offers access to retronews.fr up to 22 February 2020 within the scope of a short-term test. The platform contains around 15 million articles from 600 digitized French newspapers published in the period between 1631 and 1950.

The Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek received the seal of quality "Certified Licensor" of the Federal Association of Professional Image Providers (Bundesverband Professioneller Bildanbieter; BVPA) at the beginning of the year. This means that the Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, with its collection now grown to 17 million images, has become a member of the circle of big picture agencies, such as mauritius images or bpk.

Masterpieces of calligraphy, printing plates of copper, iron and zinc, detailed pencil drawings of landmark buildings in and around Bamberg and a fund of handwritten and drawn sources on the history of Bamberg – the new digital collections of the Bamberg State Library are equally diverse and unique.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has been making the music manuscripts from the personal papers of the most prominent composers available online for several years, among them autographs of Gustav Mahler, Josef Rheinberger, Max Reger, Heinrich Kaminski, Hugo Distler and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. At the beginning of the year 2020, the works of two of the most important German composers of the first half of the 20th century lost copyright protection: Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949) and Hans Pfitzner (1869 – 1949).

We are pleased about the 10,587 likes we have received for our 108 posts in the year 2019 on our Instagram account @bsbmuenchen.