News archive

The three newly licensed databases comprise theatre manuscripts on Shakespeare stage performances and a wide variety of source materials on the world of theatre of the 18th century and on popular entertainment of the Victorian era.

The cultural portal bavarikon presents the virtual exhibition "König Ludwig II. von Bayern – Leben, Spuren, Mythos" ("King Ludwig II of Bavaria – Life, legacy, legend") including 150 objects from 12 Bavarian cultural institutions. Everybody interested in culture and all Ludwig fans can now walk in the footsteps of the fairytale king – online.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek takes a further step towards normalising its library operations. The opening hours of the General Reading Room, so far strongly limited due to the Corona pandemic, are extended, the learning and working area "Plaza" is re-opened and also the Stabi Café opens its doors again for visitors. Further opening steps are scheduled as of Monday, 12 July 2021.

"Like other trades and sectors, a little more than one year ago, libraries had to learn very quickly that the pandemic is more than a brief thunderstorm that will be over soon. Libraries have changed at lightning speed; many of these changes will persist, will be integrated into a new normal in the course of time, will complement or replace hitherto formats and services."

"Over 40 Bavarian authors and mediators of literature benefited from our programme 'Culture in spite of Corona' during the past year", Minister of the Arts Bernd Sibler recently took stock in Munich. "Culture in spite of Corona" offers to creators of literature a virtual platform for publications, for which they receive remuneration.

In practice, digital publishing often means that the logic and layout of printed pages are transferred to the computer screen. Under the heading "dynamic publishing", the Center for Electronic Publishing (ZEP) of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is testing what further potential the digital world has for new concepts, formats and structures.

Discover the world of the Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage and of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Among other things, we report about the new app for reserving working places at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the photo archive of the photographer of aerial views Max Prugger and look back on one year of the Corona pandemic and the associated challenges for a library.

Milena Fein (Information Services) explains in a new tutorial how you can book a working place in the General Reading Room with the app "BSB Reading Room Reservation". In 3 minutes, you can learn how to operate the app and what to do on site in order to use your reservation.

The website of the German office of the Répertoire Internationale d’Iconographie Musicale (RIdIM) will be accessible at the new address ridim.musiconn.de as of 26 April 2021. Prior to this, the website and the search application for “Music and dance in the arts" were modernised with respect to their design and functionality.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has comprehensively updated and improved its digital core piece, the Digital Collections. At the address www.digitale-sammlungen.de, it has now been made even easier to search, browse, explore and admire around 2.7 million digitized titles from the holdings of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, as well as from the regional State Libraries of Augsburg, Bamberg, Regensburg and Passau.

Venice turns 1600 years old on 25 March 2021. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek congratulates very cordially and offers some delicious “appetizers” from its collection of Venetian manuscripts and incunabula, which, besides the Berlin one, is Germany’s largest collection of this kind.

Users of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek can now reserve a working place in the General Reading Room by means of a smartphone app. The new "BSB-Leseplatzreservierung" ("BSB Reading Room Reservation") permits up to five bookings in advance and, among other things, provides a map with the option to reserve your favourite working place, as well as a break function. The app is now available free of charge for Android and iOS. The General Reading Room is re-opened on 16 March 2021.

A time span of around 100 years is the period encompassed by the great collection of historical portraits of the Tucher family from Nuremberg. On the basis of selected examples from this collection, the new virtual exhibition in the cultural portal bavarikon invites you to explore the history of portrait photography and learn more about techniques and formats, such as carte de visite photography. You are also offered an insight into the family history of the former patrician family from Nuremberg in the 19th century.

The delivery of books, which is usually against payment, is offered temporarily free of charge by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek as of Thursday, 14 January 2021, for the time of the closure of the library due to the Corona pandemic. This service is offered within the bounds of our available capacities. At the same time, we would like to point out that the books and media must not be returned freight forward, meaning that users have to affix sufficient postage to return consignments. We kindly ask for your understanding.

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.