Digitisation service on demand

The digitisation service on demand is currently paused.

Do you wish to have a work in the collection of the German National Library digitised? For a fee, our digitisation service on demand gives you the option of digitising printed media and accessing them in line with copyright regulations.
Additional information can be found on our help page.

Interlibrary lending

The German National Library makes only a limited part of its holdings available for interlibrary loans. In order to preserve our collections, we only lend books if no other copy of a publication can be found in any German library. This regulation is based on the “Regulation on Interlibrary Loans in the Federal Republic of Germany – Interlibrary Loans Regulation”.

If you would like to order a book to take out on loan, please contact a library connected to the interlibrary lending network. The library's lending department will carry out a search for you to find out which libraries have the desired edition of a work.

While you are waiting, you can use the “Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue” (KVK) to research monographs.
Newspapers and periodicals can be searched using the German Union Catalogue of Serials (ZDB) .

Enquiries from libraries in the national and international interlibrary lending networks should be sent to fernleihe@dnb.de.

The German National Library reserves the right to refuse media loans if the media could sustain damage as a result.

Your library will notify you of the progress of your interlibrary loan request.

Copying and scanning on request

We prepare digital or paper copies of works in accordance with the applicable copyright regulations (§ 53 und § 60e). and in line with our collection preservation guidelines. Please send us your reproduction request via the order form (only available in German).

For copies from the holdings of the German Music Archive, please contact : info-dma@dnb.de

With effect from 1 March 2018, the Copyright Act permits the following user groups to make use of the Reproduction Service (costs up to 20 pages, digital/per fax/post, plus postage):

• Group 1 - Employees of public institutions: 7.50 Euro
• Group 1a - Students, trainees, school pupils: 6.50 Euro
• Group 2 - Private persons: 8.50 Euro

Please refer to our fee schedule for other fees.

Reproductions can only be delivered within Germany. These will be sent by post, digitally or by fax.
You will find further information at the help page.

Reference management

Individual bibliography

You can use the catalogue to compile an individual bibliography (only available in German) comprising up to 10,000 data records and export it in printable PDF format or in the Excel format csv-title. This is a free service provided by the German National Library.

In order to use this service, you are required to register.

Help

Reference management systems

The catalogue of the German National Library supports the downloading of bibliographic data with the help of literature management systems.

If you have any questions or need further information, please contact:
metadatendienste@dnb.de

Data shop

Do you want to process bibliographic data? If so, you are required to register or log into the data shop homepage.

All bibliographic data from the German National Library and the authority data from the Integrated Authority File will be provided free of charge and can be freely re-used under "Creative Commons Zero" (CC0 1.0) terms. Bibliographic and authority data can be provided in the following formats: MARC 21, MARC21-XML and RDF (various serialisations). Additional formats are available for bibliographic data: csv (csv_title), DNB Casual (oai_dc) and PDF (pdf-natbib).

To our data shop

Title registration

In the case of title registration queries, we check whether a specific title has been in print at any time since 1945. The titles are researched in both the German National Library’s database and the electronic version of the Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher (German Books in Print – VLB).

Title registration queries are handled in compliance with the Act on the Protection of Trademarks and Other Symbols (of 25/10/1994, Federal Law Gazette I 1994, 3082) and not with copyright legislation.

Title registrations published in the Börsenblatt portal for the German book trade are not taken into account. If identical or similar titles are found, you will be sent the bibliographic information.

For queries relating to title protection please use our contact form (only available in German).

Just ask us!

Do you have any questions about the German National Library and its collections, browsing the catalogue, or searching for literature on specific subjects? If so, please get in touch with us.

We will respond to your query as quickly as possible. Information is usually provided free of charge. The fees specified in the fee schedule only apply to especially difficult, time-consuming searches lasting more than a quarter of an hour.
We will gladly answer all your queries personally on site during service hours.
Just ask for us at the issues desk.