Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library)

The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek gives its users access to Germany’s cultural and intellectual heritage and encompasses books, music, works of art, films, photographs, documents, manuscripts and much more.

Panorama Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek

The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library) cooperates with hundreds of cultural and scientific institutions – archives, libraries, museums, facilities for monument preservation, and research institutes – in order to make their holdings and collections viewable online. Its search features allow millions of objects from every field of culture and every genre to be studied at no charge.

One objective of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) is to make cultural heritage accessible for education and research, or simply for enjoyment. Another is to link the digital content of the various German cultural and scientific institutions and thereby create a central digital site for Germany’s cultural heritage.

In 2012, the beta version of the online portal was launched with 5.6 million objects or object references. The release version was brought online in 2014. In 2018, the German federal government and the state governments decided to put the project on a permanent footing. Since then, the portal has grown continually and completed numerous projects. Today, over 700 cultural institutions supply data to the library, whose records now encompass over 42 million objects.

The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek is a joint project supported and funded by the German federal government, states and municipalities. The decision to create a German digital library was reached in 2009, and the project was realized through an administrative and financial agreement. The digital library is maintained by a competence network  that includes a variety of public cultural and scientific institutions. One of them is the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz.

The DDB is also Germany’s contribution to the European digital platform Europeana. The Europeana portal has been gathering digitized cultural goods from EU member states since 2008 in an effort to create a record of European cultural heritage.

The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek was founded in 2009. It is financed jointly by the federal government, the States and the Communes of Germany. The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek is the responsibility of a competence network in which various public cultural and scientific institutions participate. The Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz is one of them.

The digitization of its collections has long been a key objective of the Foundation and its institutions, and consequently the office of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek has been based at the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz since August 2011. Foundation President Hermann Parzinger is the spokesman of the board of directors of the competence network.

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Contact

Astrid B. Müller

Communication, Press, Marketing Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek

+49 (0)30 266 411434

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