What are the roles of libraries, library buildings and architecture in the digital age? We are joined by architects for a panel discussion of new spatial and usage concepts for the library of tomorrow taking the newly built National Library in Qatar as an example.

After the presentation and panel discussion, a guided tour of the German National Library will provide an opportunity to look behind the scenes of the Library’s architecture. An event held in cooperation with the MSAO Future Foundation.

Free admission. Book directly using the booking form or call: +49 341 2271-286

There are now only a few living witnesses of World War II, and soon we will only be able to hear second-hand accounts. In the book "Nie geht es nur um Vergangenheit" ("It’s never just about the past"), former refugees who now live close to the trilateral border between Germany, France and Switzerland or whose escape routes took them through this area talk about their life-changing experiences.
Editors Wolfgang Benz, Johannes Czwalina and Dan Shambicco read passages from contributions to the book on:

Monday, 4 February 2019, 19:00 Uhr, German National Library in Frankfurt am Main
Monday, 25 February 2019, 19:00, German National Library in Leipzig

Event organised by the German National Library’s German Exile Archive 1933–1945.

Free admission

Registration in Leipzig or Frankfurt am Main

In order to ensure that the open-access holdings and the Electronic Reference Library remain appealing for you, up to date and comprehensive, the German National Library conducted a survey on their demand and usage between 16 July and 18 August 2018. The results are now available.

921 people in total took part in the representative survey. This shows how important the holdings of the reference collections are to you.

Some results in brief:

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  Usage frequency: Nearly 50 per cent of those surveyed use the reading room collections frequently or during every visit.
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  Satisfaction: The survey questions on the reference collections showed satisfaction levels of over 50 per cent.

We thank all the participants! Your responses and wishes help us to improve..

You can find the full evaluation of the survey here.

Books in Hebraic script from the collection of the National Library of Israel and medieval and early modern Hebrew manuscripts from German library collections have been digitised and can now be accessed worldwide through the internet. These documents have sparked an increasing global interest in German-Jewish cultural heritage and opened up new research prospects. The digitised materials can serve as primary sources, and affiliated collections held by different libraries can now be reunited at least virtually. The project, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), was successfully completed in time for the 70th anniversary of the state of Israel in 2018 and is documented in detail in this publication. The special publication is bilingual (German/English) and is available for download in PDF format.

To the online publication

In 1913, Leipzig was the centre of the German book trade and printing industry. The city’s prestigious firms included such publishing companies as F. A. Brockhaus, Reclam and Breitkopf & Härtel. This is where the Duden dictionary, the Meyers Konversationslexikon encyclopaedia and 90 per cent of the world’s sheet music were published. And now a digital map shows how ubiquitously the cityscape was shaped by the book trade at that time.

To create the book-trade map, a total of 2,200 company locations were recorded in a database and sorted according to commercial category. Its creators then added the modern iterations of the historic addresses together with their geo-coordinates. Everything was then transferred to a digital map with an historic overlay.

The digital book-trade map is a collaborative project between the German National Library’s German Museum of Books and Writing in Leipzig and the City of Leipzig’s Office of Geoinformation and Land Management.

Click here to see the map.