News archive

Count Franz von Pocci (1807 – 1876) was not only a court official and court poet, but also an untiring draughtsman and watercolourist. As a member of the gentlemen’s club "Old England", he created caricatures of the club members, among which there were high-ranking aristocrats and commoners. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has expanded its considerable collection of Pocciana by the so-called "Anglia Albums".

On 1 July 2022, Dr. Sascha Salatowsky assumed the office of Director of the regional State Library of Coburg as the successor of Dr. Silvia Pfister, who had been in this office since 2002.

With "Art between Covers", the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek founded a blog specifically dedicated to artists’ books in 2019. It is available as a communication tool not only to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek itself, but also to other collecting institutions.

With its new virtual exhibition "Oktoberfest – History, backgrounds, highlights", bavarikon gets all fans of the "Wiesn" and everybody interested in culture and history in the mood for the 187th Munich Oktoberfest . The Internet portal of the Free State of Bavaria presents over 200 exhibits from twelve Bavarian cultural institutions, thus offering a unique digital stroll across the world’s largest fun fair – online at www.bavarikon.de/oktoberfest.

Qalamos, the portal for manuscripts from Asian and African scriptural tradition, starts on 28 June 2022. The portal pools the metadata and digital copies of manuscripts from this area from over 20 German institutions and makes them publicly accessible together for the first time.

A five-volume Torah edition, which was printed in Fürth between 1801 and 1803 and formerly owned by the famous Jewish Munich citizen Schalom Ben-Chorin (1913 – 1999), could now be purchased by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek to expand its collection of rare Hebrew Bavarica.

The virtual exhibition "Monk, rebel, librarian" has been awarded the TIP Award 2022. Realised as a practice-oriented team project of students of the University of Public Service (HfÖD) and the Bavarian Library Academy in the year 2021, the exhibition reconstructs the live and work of the library pioneer Martin Schrettinger.

We’ll bring you the stars from the sky! The new issue of the Bibliotheksmagazin, a journal jointly published by the Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, informs about current highlights from the state libraries of Berlin and Munich.

As of next Monday, 2 May, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek extends the opening hours of its reading rooms, thereby surpassing its opening hours before the Covid pandemic. The successful reading-place reservation system will be maintained for all reading rooms.

Since 2019, the State Libraries of Berlin and Munich, the University Library of Leipzig and the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel have been working on setting up the Germany-wide web portal handschriftenportal.de, which pools information on manuscripts from the Middle Ages and from modern times forming part of German collections, in a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The DFG has now approved further funding in the amount of almost five million Euros for a three-year continuation of this innovative endeavour, which is custom-fitted to the demands of researchers and collectors.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) opens the photo exhibition "Olympic Games 72 in images. Photographs from the collections of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek" on 11 May 2022. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Olympic Games of 1972, the library takes a look back at the Games and their social, political and cultural dimensions. Most of the images, part of which has not been published before, are from photo collections acquired by the BSB only recently.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek continues the indexing, digitization and setting up of an online presentation of the historical archive of the music publishing house B. Schott’s Söhne. The German Research Foundation (DFG) supports this second project phase with further funding in the amount of around 1.2 million Euro. The archive of the music publishing house seated in Mainz is considered unique among the preserved archives of publishing houses on account of its volume and comprehensiveness. It was entered in the German register of archives of national value (Länderverzeichnis national wertvoller Archive) in 2004.

For operational reasons and in order to reduce the number of unused bookings, future reservations for the General Reading Room and the Periodicals Reading Room can be made only for a maximum of 7 days in advance via the website and via the app. Existing bookings will remain valid.

On account of the war of aggression waged by the Russian Federation against Ukraine and the immeasurable suffering that the Russian government is bringing to a peaceful, democratic country, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies and the Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage suspend their cooperation with the Russian Presidential Library as from today.

As a newspaper documenting everything, "The Times" has offered important, award-winning reporting, information about parliamentary debates, critical interpretations of facts and a unique historical insight into the views taken by important reporters and issues of the epoch in question already since 1785.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has successfully submitted three consecutive requests for the continuation of the funding line "Fachinformationsdienste für die Wissenschaft" ("Specialised Information Services for Research and Scholarship"; FID) by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The library receives funds in the amount of 8.6 million Euro for the years 2022 to 2024. They will serve for the further expansion of the Specialised Information Services for Classical Studies, Historical Studies and East, Central and Southeast European Studies.

The "Economist Historical Archive" includes the complete contents of "The Economist", the most important international weekly journal for economic and financial policies, from 1843 to 2020. Also the "Financial Times" is one of the most renowned business journals of the world. The "Financial Times Historical Archive" contains the complete articles of all printed issues of the journal from 1888 to 2016.

"Libraries have not buried their heads in the sand during the pandemic, but have thought up something new." In its issue 4/2021, the Bibliotheksforum Bayern offers "many examples for the growth of digital library services, but also for the revival of analogue library services", up to and including hybrid events.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has acquired the photo archive of Volker Hinz (1947 – 2019), which includes around 1.3 million images. It comprises the entire photographic lifework of Volker Hinz for the weekly journal stern and numerous free works. With this outstanding document of photography in Germany, the library further expands its already extensive Image Archive, which is the largest of its kind held by any public-sector institution in Germany.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is expanding its digital services again: With the provision of an additional over 361,000 newspaper pages, now a total of around 8.2 million newspaper pages are retrievable at digiPress. At the portal digiPress all digitized historical newspapers from the collection of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, of a wide variety of regions and languages, from the 17th to the 20th century, are presented centrally with a multitude of functions.

With articles about Wolf Biermann’s pre-death estate at the Berlin State Library, about our new photo exhibition "Facing the Balkans" (starting on 11 November 2021) or the cultural heritage of Aschaffenburg at bavarikon. Also the review by Director General Dr. Klaus Ceynowa of 14 years' participation of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in the Google Books Project, from which around 1.2 million digital books have emerged so far, is a very interesting read.

The digital collection "Russian Social Sciences and Humanities Periodicals" contains the most important Russian journals on topics from the fields of humanities and social sciences related to Eastern Europe. It includes all 31 journals of the Russian Academy of Sciences and independent scholarly publications.

Provided that there are compelling reasons for which users cannot comply with the 3G regulation (providing evidence of full recovery from COVID or of vaccination or presenting an up-to-date negative test result) with respect to visiting the library in person, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek provides a delivery service for borrowing books for home loan and returning them as of 11 October 2021. In addition to the already existing free-of-charge delivery, also the costs of return shipment will be absorbed by the library.

The Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books has welcomed a generous donation: The television journalist Wolf von Lojewski presented Dr. Dorothea Sommer, Deputy Director General, and the library department with his collection of 326 individual sheets of Hartmann Schedel’s World Chronicle.

The "Universitetskaja Biblioteka Online" is an online repository offering access to around 70,000 Russian-language e-books and e-journals. Its focus is on humanities, with the majority of publications being about Russia.

The first 70,000 images from the STERN Photo Archive are on their way to digitization. This means that the time is drawing a bit nearer when you can see the photos online and use them.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has acquired the photo archive of Karsten de Riese, which includes around 390,000 images. With this important document of analogue photography in Germany in the second half of the 20th century, the library further expands its already extensive Image Archive, which is the largest of its kind held by any public-sector institution in Germany.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), Germany’s largest research and universal library, will migrate its library services to the cloud-based Alma® platform by Ex Libris. For almost 20 years, the BSB had used a local system that was becoming increasingly complex and meeting the limits of its performance capability. The transition to the cloud-based software as a service solution by Ex Libris, a company of the ProQuest group, is intended to significantly boost efficiency and user friendliness.

This year’s BKM special programme for the preservation of the written cultural heritage funds 78 projects. The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM, Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien) makes available around 2 million Euros for this purpose. Valuable and irreplaceable holdings are thus made accessible and are preserved for future generations.

PropylaeumSEARCH will enable you in the future to search specialised literature bearing reference to certain geographical places of the ancient world via a map-based search access point.