Digital collections
Our digital collections consist of e-books, e-papers and e-journals, online dissertations, audio books, digitally recorded music, websites and digitised works. These collections are growing at astonishing speed: while in 2008 they still only comprised 100,000 units, at the beginning of 2024 they had grown to encompass more than 14,9 million.
Depending on the copyright situation, our digital collections can be accessed worldwide through the internet or locally in our reading rooms in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main.
Some of our special collections are described here:
E-Books
2024, our collection consisted of around 1.9 million e-books, over one million books-on-demand, and nearly 86,000 digital audio books. The range of subjects covered is just as extensive as that covered by printed books.
E-Papers and e-Journals
As well as print editions, most newspaper publishers publish digital editions of daily and weekly newspapers with the same layout. These internet publications are known as e-papers. We have been collecting these digital editions since 2010 and now collect almost all the e-papers published in Germany.
Since we started collecting e-papers, we have ceased microfilming the corresponding print editions. Our holdings include microfilm versions of newspapers that date back to the end of the 1960s.
Our e-papercollection now encompasses more than 1,600 digital daily newspapers published in Germany. More than 3.9 million editions can be searched using a barrier-free e-paper search function available anywhere in the world; the publications themselves can be accessed in our reading rooms. To the e-paper overview
Journals are often also published in digital format. In some cases, these e-journals are issued in addition to the printed versions. However, increasing numbers of them are being published in digital format only. These are also added to our collection.
Online dissertations
With more than 359,000 items, we have the biggest national collection of its online dissertations in Europe. In mid-1998, we started collecting online dissertations, postdoctoral theses and other publications made available on university repositories.
Our collection also encompasses research data that clearly belongs to publications subject to the mandatory deposit requirement.
As part of the project “Electronic Dissertations Plus“ (eDissPlus) we are working with the Humboldt University of Berlin (HU) to develop a concept for the collection of research data generated and published by doctoral students during the course of their thesis projects.
Digital music recordings
Digital notated music (notated music in PDF format) has been an integral part of our collection since mid-2015. Our mandate also encompasses the collection of audio files. In many cases, these are parallel publications, i.e. online versions of musical works that have also been released on CD and/or other sound carriers. We also convert the music collected on sound carriers into WAV files and store them digitally on our servers. This process is known as migration. Migration enables you to listen to the music stored on more than 800,000 different sound carriers directly in the reading room at the touch of a button. At the same time, the migration process ensures that the content will be preserved for posterity, as sound carriers are only usable for a limited time.
Websites
Information that is only available online in digital format is an important resource for current and future research. One impressive example of how quickly websites can disappear is the case of the “Financial Times Germany”. The online archive was deactivated in the middle of 2013 after the newspaper went out of circulation. The archival copy of the website as it stood before deactivation is still available in our web archive.
We selectively harvest websites relating to specific institutions, topics and events. Our thematically structured web archive can be accessed directly through the start page and has a full-text search function. You can also access the content of our web archive by searching the catalogue.
In our reading rooms, you can also access a collection of all the .DE domain websites stored in the Internet Archive. You can search this .DE web archive by entering search terms or URLs.
To the German National Library's web archive
More information about the web archiving
Access to the web archive of international thematic and event-based collections
The German National Library contributes to the cooperative collections of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC). The IIPC’s member organisations collate websites on globally relevant topics such as climate change, the refugee crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, and on events such as European elections and the Olympic Games. The result is an international perspective on the latest events and the way in which they are depicted on the internet. These thematic collections are freely accessible from anywhere in the world.
The IIPC’s international website collections
Digitised collections
In principle, our collection also encompasses digitised versions of publications and other media works issued before 1913. In some cases, for example if the digitised work was published by an institution that we believe to be trustworthy, we merely provide links to the digitised works in their archive. We also collect digitised versions of sound recordings regardless of when the physical work was created.
We also digitise parts of our collection ourselves if copyright permits and in order to protect severely damaged materials.
We offer a licensing service for out-of-commerce works (VW-LiS) with the aim of digitising and providing open access to printed monographs dating from the 20th century. In addition, printed media from our collection can be digitised via the digitisation service on demand and made accessible in line with copyright regulations.
In the beginning of 2024, we had digitised more than 307.000 objects encompassing more than 23,2 million pages together with more than 56.000 audio objects. Here is a selection.
Last changes:
15.05.2024
