News archive

A new, highly informative issue with very many different articles is waiting for you. An event series with State Minister Bernd Sibler, who is the chairman of the Bavarian Library Association at the same time, shows the important role of libraries in the life-long learning process of the population.

A few weeks ago, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek received the so-called 100-sheet map of the Russian empire ("Stolistovaya") as a present from private ownership. Consisting of 107 sheets, the work published in Saint Petersburg from 1801 to 1804 constitutes the first multi-sheet, official map of Russia and accordingly a central source of Russian cartography in the 19th century.

In August, the Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has uploaded a further 1,200 images to the online catalogue. Among them are numerous recent acquisitions, such as a coloured steel engraving of the French general Louis Alexandre Berthier (1753), who was married to a Bavarian princess and niece of King Max I Joseph.

Titled "preserve – collect – discover", the regularly published annual report of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek gives an up-to-date picture of the institution. If you would like to learn more about the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, its key figures, highlights and organisation structures, you can now also retrieve the current annual report for 2017 online.

The foundation of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek was laid 460 years ago with the important scholar's library of the Austrian chancellor Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter. It was already in the spring of 1558 that Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria bought the personal estate of Widmannstetter for confessional-political reasons. Widmannstetter's collection included not only a thousand manuscripts and printed works in the Latin, Greek, Hebrew and some oriental languages, but also important contemporary documents.