Research needs content, research needs context
The German National Library provides an extensive range of services for science and research. The Scientific Service provides support at all stages of the research process for researchers whose projects involve DNB holdings. DNBLab with its multitude of tools, open access data and resources, is the main infrastructural access point for anyone interested in text and data mining. The DH call and DH fellowships support innovative research ideas in the digital humanities. Our aim with these is to secure Germany's archived cultural heritage a dynamic place in society.
CommunityHub: Scientific Service
The Scientific Service supports research projects based on the German National Library's holdings, collections and metadata. We act as a reliable partner and an advisory and organisational interface with the German National Library which will accompany you all the way from the initial idea through the application process to the organisational realisation of your research project. In this context, we supervise all kinds of research projects, especially in the fields of the digital humanities and citizen science. We look forward to receiving your enquiries about possible projects and discussing them with you at wd@dnb.de
All current information regarding the Scientific Service and its services can be found here
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Access to digital collections
With regard to availability, a distinction is made between publications with no access restrictions, publications with access restrictions, metadata and authority data. Please visit our website for more information about how they differ and what the differences mean in practice.
Open Access: Access to digital collections
DNBLab
We can offer the German National Library's entire holdings of bibliographic and authority data, metadata on individual, freely available content collections and the use, with certain provisos, of our collection of digital objects. Information about how to access our free data, object files and full texts by download and through various interfaces is available in DNBLab.
DNBLab: Access to data sets and digital objects
If you would like to conduct research using other data holdings from the German National Library, please contact us at: lab@dnb.de.
Support programmes
The German National Library supports academia and research, and offers various text and data mining services for this purpose. Since 2020, we have been publishing an annual digital humanities call (DH call), requesting applications from researchers who wish to work with our data and digital objects.
2022 we expanded our offer in support of DH research to include fellowships for the first time. Our objective is to encourage young researchers with a first academic degree and experience in digital humanities to carry out research using the German National Library’s data and collections.
HERMES research study programme
Are you keen to work with innovative methods, and do you need the German National Library's data to do so? The research study programme, which is part of the HERMES project, supports studies of selected collections of open-access and protected data in order to promote data competence. Every year, financing is awarded for up to four studies lasting three months each.
Current call for HERMES research study programme
DH Call
Are you planning or already working on a DH research project and need access to metadata or digital content from the German National Library? We support research projects as part of our DH Call and provide the necessary data and infrastructure. The DH call also offers the opportunity to work with copyright-protected material in accordance with the provisions of property rights (Urheberrechtsgesetz) § 60d.
Current DH Call
DH fellowships
Are you interested in working with our data and already have some experience with digital humanities methods? Our DH fellowships offer the opportunity to conduct research on our metadata and our free digital content. For this purpose, we grant fellowships for a period of 3 to 6 months including a monthly living allowance.
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Text and Data Mining
Besides its collection of physical media (35.7 million objects), the German National Library has also established an extensive digital collection of 17.4 million objects including e-books, e-journals, e-papers and other digital objects. In accordance with property rights (Urheberrechtsgesetz) § 60d rights holder legislation, these are available for automated analysis (Text and Data Mining) for research purposes.
Automated analysis is however permitted solely on infrastructure and in rooms belonging to the German National Library.
If you are interested in this service, please send us a short description of your project or contact us in advance at: DH-Call@dnb.de.
Services
The DNB is happy to support your research by offering standardised data copies free of charge. You can also use our metadata services for Data selection according to your own criteria. There is a charge for this service.
In accordance with German law on copyright and intellectual property rights (Urheberrechtsgesetz) § 60d, you may digitise printed media for the purpose of academic research. There is also a charge for this service.
If your research requires German National Library metadata that is not yet freely available, please contact metadatendienste@dnb.de.
Spheres of activity and findings
The German National Library is increasing its co-operation with the Digital Humanities in the form of workshops and research collaborations, with the aim of exchanging expertise with experts in the field, finding new ways of working together and mining the potential of its own digital data holdings. Initial publications and applications have highlighted the possibilities the German National Library’s digital collection can offer.
Projects
2022
DisKo: Establishing a diversity corpus (DisKo) as the foundation for algorithmic text analyses: Mareike Schumacher (TU Darmstadt) and Marie Flüh (University of Hamburg) are creating a diverse reference corpus in order to extract a training corpus which can then be annotated and subsequently used for the machine-learning of their gender classifier. The German National Library is supporting the project by digitising the required literature, through OCR recognition and by creating the corpus.
More information about the project: https://msternchenw.de/diversitaets-korpus/
The DNB catalogue as data-source and research object of digital historical press research: in this project, Erik Koenen (University of Bremen – ZeMKI) is researching the potential of the digital DNB catalogue as a research object in the context of newspapers. The German National Library is advising on the history of newspaper-collecting and its own collections of this medium, and is also providing the project with technical support.
FOREXSCIFI - Foresight Extraction from Science Fiction Literature: Jan Oliver Schwarz (TH Ingolstadt), Christoph Bläsi (Univesity of Mainz) and Markus May (LMU München) are analysing science-fiction literature in order to generate statements on potential future developments in technology, ecology, economics, food production, society and communication as well as their interdependencies. To this end, the German National Library is creating a corpus, digitising a selection of literature and providing access to its infrastructure.
2021
Secret best-sellers: Christine Haug (LMU Munich) researches the history of German dime novel from its beginnings to the mid-20th century. The German National Library is supporting this project by digitising dime novels and providing access to it via the own infrastructure.
Leipzig as the centre of the global tobacco and fur trade between the two world wars: On the basis of academic journals, Werner Scheltjens (University of Bamberg) analyses the role of Leipzig as the centre of the international tobacco and fur trade in the time between the two world wars. The German National Library is supporting this project by digitising serial publications and providing access to these via the own infrastructure.
Mapping Translated German Fiction with the German National Library Catalogue: Lisa Maria Teichmann (McGill University, Montreal, Canada) is conducting quantitative analyses of translations of German fiction. The German National Library is supporting this project by providing access to bibliographic metadata and giving advice on how to analyse it.
2020
Fascism in the eyes of the (inter)national public: Lutz Klinkhammer, Jörg Hörnschemeyer (both from the German Historical Institute in Rome) and Jan Rohden (Max Weber Foundation) are investigating the perception and portrayal of Fascism and National Socialism in the press and publishing landscape of 1933–1945. The German National Library is providing full copies of the GND, bibliographic data, metadata and full texts from the Exile Press for this purpose.
Freedom of expression and hate speech as reflected in the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG): Jens Pohlmann (University of Bremen) is investigating and comparing statements on matters of network policy found in IT blogs and websites. We are providing a comparative e-paper corpus consisting of 10 daily newspapers on our infrastructure for analytical purposes.
“Fremdes in Kochbüchern” (Otherness in cookery books): Christoph Bläsi (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz) and Edith Blaschitz (Danube University Krems) are researching the processes involved when “foreign” foods are assimilated into German-language cookery books. For this, the DNB is providing a corpus of approx. 6,000 authentic digital cookery books on its own infrastructure for automatic analysis. To the video
Pseudonyms in literature: Jörg Lehmann (Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen) is using 23,000 GND records provided by the DNB to investigate the motives and goals of authors who write literary works under pseudonyms.
2018
Macroanalytical study of dime novels: Fotis Jannidis, Leonard Konle (both from the Julius- Maximilians-Universität of Würzburg) and Peter Leinen (German National Library) are conducting quantitative analyses of so-called dime novels and comparing them with classical literature. We are placing our infrastructure and a corpus of approx. 40,000 objects at their disposal for the purpose of performing automated analyses.
Publications
- Quaasdorf, Friedrich: Kompetenzerwerb und Kompetenzerhalt, in ABI Technik 45 (2025), Heft 3, S. 329-334. https://doi.org/10.1515/abitech-2025-0050
- Nitsche, Stephanie; Taube, Anke: Von der Idee zum DNBLab: ein zentraler Zugang zu digitalen Ressourcen, in: ABI Technik 45 (2025), Heft 3. https://doi.org/10.1515/abitech-2025-0047
- Erdmann, Daniel; Freyberg, Linda; Kaden, Ben; Knipping-Sorokin, Roman; Kuhn, Roman; Nitsche, Stephanie; Taube, Anke: Labs und Makerspaces für wissenschaftliche Kontexte – Eine kollaborative Annäherung, in: ABI Technik 45 (2025), Heft 3. https://doi.org/10.1515/abitech-2025-0044
- Teichmann, Lisa: Mapping German fiction in translation in the German National Library catalogue (1980-2020), 2023. https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/0p096d03z?locale=en
- Herrmann, J. Berenike; Grisot, Giulia; Gubser, Susanne; Kreyenbühl, Elias (2021): Ein großer Berg Daten? Zur bibliothekswissenschaftlichen Dimension des korpusliteraturwissenschaftlichen Digital Humanities-Projekts „High Mountains – Deutschschweizer Erzählliteratur 1880–1930“. In: 027.7 Zeitschrift Für Bibliothekskultur / Journal for Library Culture, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.21428/1bfadeb6.6e2feff6
- Döhl, Frédéric: Digital Turn – Gedächtnisinstitutionen und Digital Humanities. Zwischenbericht aus einer Workshop-Reihe der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek, in: ZfBB – Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 67/3-4 (2020), S. 213-230. http://dx.doi.org/10.3196/1864295020673496
- Döhl, Frédéric; Zechmann, Dorothea: Digital Humanities und Recht: Zu den neuen Regeln für das Text und Data Mining (TDM) und ihrem strategischen Potential für die Bibliotheken, in b.i.t. online 23 (2020) Nr. 4, S. 397-404. https://www.b-i-t-online.de/heft/2020-04-fachbeitrag-doehl.pdf
- Schöch, Christof; Döhl, Frédéric; Rettinger, Achim; Gius, Evelyn; Trilcke, Peer; Leinen, Peter; Jannidis, Fotis; Hinzmann, Maria; Röpke, Jörg: Abgeleitete Textformate: Prinzip und Beispiele, in: Recht und Zugang 1.2, 2020, 160–175. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5771/2699-1284-2020-2-160
- Vorndran, Angela; Grund, Stefan (2019): Using Graph Visualization to enhance representation and evaluation of work clusters. Paper presented at: IFLA WLIC 2019 - Athens, Greece - Libraries: dialogue for change. Session S15 - Big Data. In: Data intelligence in libraries: the actual and artificial perspectives, 22-23 August 2019, Frankfurt, Germany. http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2723
- Jannidis, Fotis; Konle, Leonard; Leinen, Peter: “Thematic Complexity”. DH Conference Abstracts 2019. Utrecht. https://doi.org/10.34894/DHHKKT
- Jannidis, Fotis; Konle, Leonard; Leinen, Peter: Makroanalytische Untersuchung von Heftromanen. In: DHd 2019. Digital Humanities: multimedial & multimodal. Konferenz-abstracts. 2019, p. 167-172. https://zenodo.org/record/2596095#.Xde4jm5Fzct
- Döhl, Frédéric: Digital Humanities und Bibliotheken. Über technisch-organisatorische Infrastruktur hinausgedacht, in: ZfBB – Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie 66/1 (2019), S. 4-18. http://dx.doi.org/10.3196/186429501966114
- Döhl, Frédéric: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verstärkt Engagement in den Digital Humanities, in: Dialog mit Bibliotheken 2, 2019, S. 9-11. urn:nbn:de:101-2019081635
- Vorndran, Angela (2018): Hervorholen, was in unseren Daten steckt! Mehrwerte durch Analysen großer Bibliotheksdatenbestände. In: o-bib. Das offene Bibliotheksjournal, Bd. 5 Nr. 4 (2018), S. 166–180. https://www.o-bib.de/article/view/5414/7411
- Fischer, Frank; Jäschke, Robert: Liebe und Tod in der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Der DNB-Katalog als Forschungsobjekt der digitalen Literaturwissenschaft. In: DHd2018: ”Kritik der digitalenVernunft”, Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum, Cologne, Germany. 261-266. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01787558/document
- Herseni, Johannes et al.: Die bibliografischen Daten der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek entfalten. In: Dialog mit Bibliotheken 1, 2018, S. 11-16. https://d-nb.info/115432141X/34
Applications
Contact
Scientific Service: wd@dnb.de
Stephanie Nitsche: s.nitsche@dnb.de
Facilitating research - Linking the scientific community
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