News archive

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has recently extended access to the digital newspaper archives of two of the biggest American dailies again: "The New York Times" from 1851 to 2015 and "The Washington Post" from 1877 to 2002.

Within the framework of an event on 4 December 2019, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has restituted 203 illegally acquired books from its holdings to the German Masonic Museum in Bayreuth in the presence of Minister of Sciences Bernd Sibler. The library thus continues its endeavours started in 2003 to return NS loot to its original owners or their heirs or legal successors.

Following the Evas Töchter (Eve's daughters) exhibition at the Monacensia in the Hildebrandhaus (2018) and looking back on 100 years of women's suffrage, the bavarikon exhibition wants to take influential women writers in Bavaria into account. On display are digital copies from Munich's female writers, all of whose personal papers are kept in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek – their fictional works and essays, their correspondence with the city's cultural and literary personalities within and outside the women's movement, as well as portraits of their most important representatives.

"When you take a look at the table of contents of this issue of Bibliotheksforum Bayern, you will notice at once: the issue is penetrated in its entirety by all things digital. Not only are there five articles explicitly dedicated to the digital library, but there are also other sections which deal with this topic again and again: 'Continuity in the midst of change: Increasing use of digital media', 'Blended learning, gamification and co.' and 'Social media in professional training' – the article titles speak a clear language."

The Directors General of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Dr. Klaus Ceynowa and Dr. Dorothea Sommer, were delighted to take a look at the artist’s book created in 2002, for which Anselm Kiefer treated photographs with ash and lead. "Die Ungeborenen" – the unborn – are all children who were aborted, never begotten or those who will be born in the future. The prominent recent acquisition joins a further Libri Selecti of the artist: The large-format "Euridike" came to the collection of artists’ books almost 30 years ago.

The collection of over 100 Tibetan book covers of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has been expanded by a show-piece from the 15th/ 16th century. The artistically painted specimen shows the historical Buddha with his students and characters of Tibetan Buddhism.

21 November 2019 – 30 April 2020
Cabinet presentation from the series "Musical treasures"
With the accession to power of Elector Karl Theodor in 1778, a new epoch started also for music in Munich. The musicians of the famous Mannheim court orchestra accompanied the Elector and set new standards in the music scene in Munich. In a presentation in the hallway of the Department of Music, facsimiles of music manuscripts of the Mannheim composers are shown. In addition, there are libretti on operas, melodramas and ballets by the court musicians, first editions of printed sheet music, contemporary portraits and documentary material.

Around 1.2 million tables of contents, registers, blurbs, abstracts and more permit checking the content of scholarly book publications during your research in the OPACplus/ BSB catalogue already before ordering, and thus permit ordering the desired titles in a more targeted manner.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has just made its 2.5 millionth digital copy available online. Around 70 percent of its copyright-free holdings have thus been made freely accessible on the Internet. Scholars, researchers and the broad public are thus provided with fast and easy access to important treasures of culture and knowledge.

From a handwritten slip of paper of a Munich "Boazn" – a simple pub – to the elaborately printed "official menu" of a bourgeois traditional restaurant: As of now, bavarikon offers menus of Munich catering businesses from the time between 1888 and 1983. They form part of the archive materials of the large Munich breweries Löwenbräu and Paulanerbräu, which are kept at the Bavarian Economic Archive.

The newly available volume of scholarly catalogues of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek comprises not only the French illuminated manuscripts from the 10th to the end of the 14th century, but Ulrike Bauer-Eberhardt also describes all English and Spanish manuscripts with adornments.

The "Bibliotheksmagazin" is published three times per year to report about the collections, activities and services of the state libraries in Berlin and Munich. Issue 3/ 19 has just been published.

On the occasion of next year’s exhibition "MUNICH. Now LOOK at that! – The Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek" (06/03 – 21/06/2020) we offer, for the first time, an opulent wall calendar at the special price of EUR 9.00, which is available at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and by purchase order. The calendar features partly unpublished rare photographs from our photographic archives.

1 October – 30 December 2019
Cabinet presentation
The cabinet presentation in German and Czech is composed of ten richly illustrated banners on topics like "Protestant movements in the 16th century", "Hus und Luther" or "Religious diversity in Moravia". The exhibition project of the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe has been set up in cooperation with the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren.

Most students of the LMU have already obtained their personal LMUcard. The LMUcard replaces the white library reader pass valid so far, since the library function – also for the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek – has been integrated in the LMUcard. Please note that the white reader passes starting with the numbers 31 to 39 will become invalid as of 30 September 2019.

The Department of Music of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has developed a new service for the expert community of musicology together with the Saxon State and University Library Dresden: musiconn – the new portal of the Specialised Information Service for Musicology, has been launched online now, in a beta version for the time being.

Up to the end of 2019, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek offers registered users the opportunity to test online reference works of the scholarly publishing house Oxford University Press on a great variety of disciplines free of charge.

Inclusion programmes in libraries, 70th anniversary of the International Youth Library and intercultural understanding, the TUM Speaker’s Corner, historical book treasures in Bavaria... The new issue of Bibliotheksforum Bayern (2019, issue 3) is available online now!

The Eastern European collection of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has acquired a number of rare children's books in recent years from the antiquarian book trade, which document military and war propaganda of the years 1938 to 1945 which had been directed explicitly at children.

On time for the end of the 100-year anniversary of the First World War and the November Revolution, the adding of the old subject headings from the time between 1914 and 1981 in the homonymous special catalogue of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek could be concluded.

On 29 July 2019, the starting signal was given for an extended test phase of the project DeepGreen, in which the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is a participant. The objective of DeepGreen is to distribute publications by publishing houses to authorized repositories automatically and to thus facilitate secondary open-access publication in Germany.

The Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies has acquired a license for the database "Ukrainian Publications", granting users free-of-charge access to over 40 newspapers and journals from Ukraine.

In the presence of Bernd Sibler, the Bavarian State Minister of Sciences, Research and the Arts, the analogue photographic archive of the magazine STERN is presented for the first time today at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), with a number of former STERN photographers taking part as well. Moreover, a small selection of photographs is shown. The Hamburg publishing house Gruner + Jahr donated the analogue photographic archive of the magazine STERN, which comprises 15 million photographs, to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek at the start of 2019, in order to ensure the long-term existence of the archive and to make it accessible to the public and research.

The "Stabi Café" will be reconstructed for you! The seating area in the interior is closed for this purpose. The lounge and the exterior area remain accessible. And of course, food and beverages continue to be sold at the counter. The reopening is planned for the end of summer.

For registered users, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek provides free-of-charge access for one year to over 150,000 scholarly e-books of the provider ProQuest, comprising contents covering all academic disciplines.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has acquired a license for a comprehensive reference work on the history of early Christianity. The encyclopaedia offers extensive articles on texts, authors and ideas. The content is intended to bridge the gap between studies of the New Testament and patrology, covering the entire time of early Christianity up to 600 AD.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the University Library of Tübingen provide Germany-wide access to a special database on Gregory of Nyssa with full texts of the church father in the Greek language as well as a lexicon of authors within the scope of the Specialised Information Service for Classical Studies – Propylaeum and Theology managed by the two institutions and with the support of the German Research Foundation.

The Center for Electronic Publishing (ZEP) of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has activated a document server on contemporary history – for the time being in a beta version – in cooperation with the Institute for Contemporary History Munich – Berlin (IfZ). Many publications of the IfZ are accessible here in the open-access format as of now.

Since July 2019, researchers have been enabled obtain access to the extensive source database "Secret Files from World Wars to Cold War" following individual registration with the Specialised Information Service for Historical Studies.

The former bishop of the Roman-Catholic diocese of Timișoara (Romania), Martin Roos, visited the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in July. On this occasion, he presented the library with a facsimile of a unique manuscript of Saint Gerard of Csanád safeguarded by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Clm 6211).