News archive

The European Biographical Portal enables access to more than 160,000 scholarly biographies of persons from all social backgrounds and covers most of the periods from German, Austrian, Swiss, Slovenian, and South-East European history.

Workshop within the framework of the Specialised Information Service for Historical Studies
25 – 26 October 2017
Our invitation addresses all interested scholars and librarians alike to participate, find out and discuss.

As of now, you can produce scans and printouts – also from microfiche and microfilm – yourself at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. A scanner for such materials is provided at the copy station in the General Reading Room.

In its annual report, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek regularly documents 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 current annual report for 2016 is also available online.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek returns 56 unlawfully acquired books from its holdings to two institutions and one individual, thus facing up to its responsibility.

Since the beginning of July 2017, users can suggest book acquisitions for the areas of collection emphasis of classical studies, historical studies, musicology and Russian, east and south-east European studies. We appreciate receiving your requests and indications regarding gaps in our collections, web contents of scholarly relevance and research trends and will check whether we can incorporate them in our spectrum of media and services.

On its website, the Literature Portal Bavaria has offered a comprehensive overview of Bavaria as a country of literature, of authors and of literature events for exactly five years. On the occasion of this anniversary on 16 July 2017, we would like to present an overview of the work of the preceding years.

Cabinet presentation of the series "Musical treasures"
17 July – 17 November 2017
On 17 July 1717, the orchestra music by George Frideric Handel, storied as the so-called "Water Music", was performed for the first time in London. At this historical event, a full-size orchestral ensemble accompanied the English King George I on a boat trip on the Tames with great success. In time for the 300th anniversary of this event, the Music Department presents a cabinet presentation with compositions inspired by rivers and seas, from the Danube to the Vltava, from the Rhine to the Isar.

Art and culture in the 3D format: Since 2013, bavarikon has presented selected exhibits from Bavarian collections in the form of three-dimensional digital copies, thus constituting Germany's first regional portal to offer photo-realistic 3D models interactively on the Internet. Now, a new milestone has been reached. The 50th 3D model has been put online in bavarikon.

Over 1.9 million digitized volumes, the largest fleet of scanners of all German cultural institutions, innovation projects such as the image-based similarity search, the newspaper portal digiPress, apps, 3D digitization, new presentation systems for digital contents, cooperation projects with Google, the Stanford University Libraries or the Fraunhofer Society and much more mark the digitization strategy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. The library now celebrates the 20th anniversary of its Munich Digitization Center (MDZ).

In cooperation with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek publishes the Bibliotheksmagazin for the interested public three times per year. It features interesting reports and news from the exciting world of the two large German universal libraries.

The journal Bibliotheksforum Bayern contains specialised articles and news informing about all areas of public and academic librarianship in Bavaria, Germany and the world. The current issue 2/2017 is dedicated largely to the topic "music libraries in Bavaria".

Within the framework of a ceremonial act on 19 June 2017, the Free State of Bavaria restituted 44 manuscripts, map works and files from the holdings of the state archive of Nuremberg and of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek to the descendants of the Munich Orientalist Prof. Karl Süßheim. The family had been dispossessed of the works in the time of the Third Reich.

At an auction, which took place in Munich at the beginning of May, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek successfully acquired a large portion of the personal papers of the widely known journalist and author Gerhart Herrmann Mostar (1901 – 1973), whose professional life and work was closely connected to Munich.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek expands its digital services again, launching the newspaper portal digiPress for the presentation of digitized newspapers. Up to the end of the year, the research portal will almost triple in volume: from currently 340 to over 1,000 copyright-free historical newspaper titles.

On the occasion of the anniversary of the Russian revolutions of 1917, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is producing a continuously growing digital newspaper compilation about the revolutionary events, from the "February Revolution" to the "October Revolution".

25 April – 7 July 2017
Cabinet presentation of the Image Archive
"Images, images, images – The photographic archives of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek" is the title of the current presentation of the Image Archive, which can be visited as of now up to 7 July 2017 in front of the Reading Room for Music, Maps and Images.

One hundred years ago, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof died in Warsaw. The Jewish ophthalmologist is the inventor of the constructed language "Esperanto". Throughout his life, he strived to further international understanding and peace by means of a neutral language. The virtual exhibition "Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof" now offers further insight into the life and work of Zamenhof.

The astronomic manuscript in the Arabic language was created in Isfahan between 1630 and 1650. It comprises 100 sheets, contains numerous illustrations with graphical drawings of the planets' orbits and very finely drawn allegoric representations in human form.

The database made available within the framework of the Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies contains archive materials on the history of the Soviet vacation camp Artek on the Crimea. The collection offers valuable insight into the educational system and social history of the Soviet Union.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) and the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden; SLUB) have started the second phase of the "Fachinformationsdienst Musikwissenschaft" (FID Musikwissenschaft, "Specialised Information Service for Musicology"), a three-year project subsidised by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with around EUR 1.5 million. The objective of the project is to make relevant information services for cutting-edge research in musicology available professionally in Germany.

The app "Famous Books" presents a selection of 52 most valuable manuscripts, unique incunabula and printed works from the Occident and the Orient. The digitized works of high colour brilliance can now be browsed in their entirety with infinite zoom on both Apple devices and, as of late, Android devices.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has digitized the total of the extensive personal papers of Count August von Platen, which have been preserved by the library since 1870 and include many thousand pages. This means that the complete oeuvre of the Romantic author, who lived from 1796 to 1835, is now accessible online.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich and the University of Passau have launched the "Sprechender Sprachatlas von Niederbayern und dem angrenzenden Böhmerwald" ("Speaking linguistic atlas of Lower Bavaria and the adjacent Bohemian Forest region"), which has been developed in a cooperation project. The interactive service is directed at a broad public and is accessible as of now via the Bayerische Landesbibliothek Online.

The Munich Digitization Center has made the 1.2-millionth work accessible online by digitizing one of the most magnificent books of hours of the school of Ghent-Bruges (Clm 28345). The manuscript with 28 whole-page, 60 half- and quarter-page and smaller miniatures and 24 bas-de-page calendar miniatures can be browsed online in its entirety now.

As of late, ten red banners with quotes of well-known philosophers, authors, scholars and publicists have been gracing the pilasters of the gallery of our grand staircase. While being very different, the quotes "all have in common that they express something worth reflecting and something controversial from the manifold life worlds of the mind and culture", explains Director General Dr. Klaus Ceynowa, who has also selected them.

Titled "Martin Luther and the early Reformation in Bavaria. Supporters, adversaries, sympathisers", the cultural portal bavarikon presents its first virtual exhibition in 2017, the year of the Reformation's anniversary. The exhibition is unique, not only with respect to its volume, but also the approach taken: Twenty-one cultural institutions take part in the virtual exhibition showing 123 high-carat exhibits.

The new digital source collection has been licensed within the framework of the Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies with the support of the German Research Foundation. It pools documents on the activities of US intelligence services in connection with the Soviet Union, showing their successes and failures.

In the "Digital Collections", the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek now presents all music autographs by the German composer Heinrich Kaminski (1886 – 1946) held by the Department of Music. Kaminski, originally from Tiengen in the Black Forest area, lived in Heidelberg and Berlin after his years of studies, and later, as of 1914, in the small village of Ried in Upper Bavaria.

The "Bibliotheksmagazin" is published three times per year to report about the collections, activities and services of the state libraries in Berlin and Munich. The issue 1/17 of the journal will be presented in a new layout for the first time. The library journal can also be retrieved online.