News archive

In the light of the current situation, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is directing its focus more strongly at its digital contents and optimizes its services for users. These services range from a simplified registration process to virtual exhibitions. The library building of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek currently remains closed for visitors. In order to support its users, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek offers numerous digital contents and search possibilities on its web pages. In addition, its services and procedures are being optimized for users.

Even in a time of lockdown and social distancing, bavarikon continues offering the opportunity to experience art and culture without limitation! What is more – we are working on expanding our services continuously and are particularly pleased that we can now make available around 40,000 new content items for you in the extended collection "Books on Bavaria". This means that we have now exceeded the threshold of 300,000 digital copies!

Published continuously since 1917, "Gudok" is one of the oldest and high-ranking specialist journals in Russia. While it started out with small print runs as a journal dedicated predominantly to topics revolving around the railway industry, the journal evolved in the course of time to become a journal of nation-wide coverage due to its increasing popularity.

The platform SAGE Knowledge offers access to English-language e-books, encyclopaedias and reference books of the publishing house SAGE in full-text form, in particular from the fields of humanities and social sciences, including numerous internationally commended titles.

6 March – 21 June 2020
250 historical images from the mid-19th century up to the 1970s invite visitors to go on an exciting journey through time in Munich and its surroundings. The extraordinary photographs are from well-known Munich photographers, such as Franz Hanfstaengl, Georg Fruhstorfer, Felicitas Timpe or Heinrich Hoffmann. The Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, which manages the photographic legacies and image archives, offers a representative insight into the institution’s outstanding photograph collections.

DigiLABS, the "Digitaler Literaturatlas von Bayerisch-Schwaben" has been launched online today. Being the only one of its kind within Germany, the digitization project provides a cartography of the literature landscape of the Bavarian part of Swabia. The places of activity of authors from the Bavarian-Swabian region, as well as historical sites of literature can be found marked on a digital map.

Tusculum, near Rome, was the city where Cicero had his country house, which served as his retreat. Tusculum was considered the epitome of leisure and of valuable escapes from a demanding everyday life – and gave its name to the famous book series. The "Sammlung Tusculum" (collection Tusculum) is the most extensive book series on Greek and Latin literature in the German language area.

The website of the Consulting Center for Public Libraries has been submitted to a complex relaunch. The website has been rendered more professional and easy to use by the responsible working group web relaunch in cooperation with the editorial team of the consulting center in charge of the specialised columns and staff members of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

bavarikon newly features around 190 lithographies. These are prints produced in the lithographic printing technique – a method developed in Munich, which revolutionised the reproduction of image materials.

The Specialised Information Service for Historical Studies offers access to retronews.fr up to 22 February 2020 within the scope of a short-term test. The platform contains around 15 million articles from 600 digitized French newspapers published in the period between 1631 and 1950.

The Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek received the seal of quality "Certified Licensor" of the Federal Association of Professional Image Providers (Bundesverband Professioneller Bildanbieter; BVPA) at the beginning of the year. This means that the Image Archive of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, with its collection now grown to 17 million images, has become a member of the circle of big picture agencies, such as mauritius images or bpk.

Masterpieces of calligraphy, printing plates of copper, iron and zinc, detailed pencil drawings of landmark buildings in and around Bamberg and a fund of handwritten and drawn sources on the history of Bamberg – the new digital collections of the Bamberg State Library are equally diverse and unique.

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has been making the music manuscripts from the personal papers of the most prominent composers available online for several years, among them autographs of Gustav Mahler, Josef Rheinberger, Max Reger, Heinrich Kaminski, Hugo Distler and Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. At the beginning of the year 2020, the works of two of the most important German composers of the first half of the 20th century lost copyright protection: Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949) and Hans Pfitzner (1869 – 1949).

We are pleased about the 10,587 likes we have received for our 108 posts in the year 2019 on our Instagram account @bsbmuenchen.

Due to construction work by the Stadtwerke (department of public works) Munich on a district cooling pipeline, access to the BSB's parking lot for disabled visitors will be possible exclusively via the entrance at Kaulbachstrasse 9 (Bavarian Supreme Audit Office) as of Monday, 27 January 2020, presumably up to 1 March 2020.

Today, travellers have a wide range of information at their disposal, from conventional travel literature to experience reports on the Internet. But which media did travellers use in the late Middle Ages? Who was even able to travel? Pioneers of travel at that time were pilgrims. As a result, one of the most important German-language travel reports of this time is thanks to a Jerusalem pilgrim, Hans VI Tucher (1428 – 1491).

The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has received the personal papers of the composer Josef Anton Riedl (born in Munich in 1927, died in Murnau in 2016), including both his musical work and documentation of his life, as a donation by the family von Külmer, Christiane and Stefanie von Külmer.

The historical archives of the British dailies "The Daily Telegraph" (1855 – 2000) and "Daily Mail" (1896 – 2004), as well as that of "The Listener" (1929 – 1991), a weekly publication of the BBC containing discussions and comments on predominantly cultural and intellectual radio programmes, have now been made available in digital form at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

The recently licensed database "Visual History Archive" offers access to 55,000 digitized interviews recorded in 62 countries and in 41 languages, predominantly with survivors of the Holocaust.

Political scientists and historians in the field of eastern-European studies in Germany can look forward to free-of-charge access to the new database "Russia Presidential Election 2018", for which a license has been acquired recently within the scope of the Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies.

Volume 5 of the catalogue of Greek manuscripts of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich introduces 83 manuscripts. More than half of the codices originally formed part of the collection of the Augsburg trader Johann Jakob Fugger (1516 – 1575) and of manuscript holdings sold by the widely known writer and manuscript trader Andreas Darmarios to Duke William V of Bavaria in 1583. This means that they formed part of the collection at the time of foundation of the Munich court library.

Elector Karl Theodor (reigned 1777 – 1799) decided on 18 December 1789 to have his Munich court library "opened for use by all and sundry ... without distinction of class or status ... for the promotion of scholarship". The princely book collection was on its way to a state institution; its opening constituted a milestone for the public.

The fifth catalogue volume on the Latin and medieval manuscripts of the Benedictine abbey St. Emmeram in Regensburg contains detailed codicological and contentual descriptions of 142 manuscripts of the 8th to the 16th century, a temporal focus of the preserved works being on the 15th century.

15 November 2019 – 15 January 2020
The Bulgarian Consulate General in Munich celebrates the 140th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between the two countries with a documentary exhibition, making phases from the development of German-Bulgarian diplomacy visible from 1879 to the present.

In the course of the coming three years, the German Research Foundation will fund the development of a union catalogue and of a portal "Orient-Digital" for oriental manuscripts. It is intended to establish common cataloguing standards, to convert printed catalogues into electronic ones and to pool all existing electronic catalogue entries. Under the direction of the Oriental Department of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Gotha Research Library, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich and the University Computation Center (URZ) Leipzig will be cooperating closely.

The Specialised Information Service for Russian, East and Southeast European Studies has acquired two new source collections with so far unpublished or not readily accessible materials on the resistance against the German occupation of Belarus during the Second World War.

The diverse and comprehensive collection on ethnomusicology includes materials from all over the world. The database contains thousands of audio field recordings and interviews, educational recordings, film materials, field books, slides, correspondence and ephemera from more than 60 fields of study, from West Africa, North America and South-East Asia among other regions.

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.