General Information on the Collection of Physical Media Works and Online Publications

Whether on paper or other carrier materials or in digital form: The German National Library collects books, magazines and newspapers, sheet music, maps, standards, audio books, music, websites and more - without evaluation, in the original and as completely as possible. In 2022, there were a total of 2,569,764 million physical media works and online publications newly added to the collection. The total holdings have grown to approximately 46,229,317 million media works.

Online publications already account for about a quarter of the total holdings. In November 2022, the threshold of twelve million collected online publications was exceeded. About three quarters of these - a total of about 9 million media works - are periodical publications. With about 1,200 current titles, the e-paper collection covers all daily newspapers published online in Germany. The DNB's collection of e-journals includes more than 12,800 current titles. The delivery of online publications is done via automated procedures. In this process, metadata in recognized international standards are transmitted together with the digital publication.

Web archive

More than 10,000 time slices of websites were archived for the German National Library's Web Archive in 2022. In addition to regular crawls on selected topics and institutions, the year under review also saw the creation of collections on current events such as documenta 15 or the energy crisis in Germany as of fall 2022. The German National Library also participated in the cooperative collection of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) on the war in Ukraine and contributed around 140 German URLs to the international collection.

Digitization

In addition to standard business processes, systematic collection digitization is now in routine operation at both locations. A total of 47,000 items containing over 4.5 million pages and 167,000 tables of contents of books have been digitized.

Budget and staff

In 2022, the German National Library managed a budget of around EUR 60.7 million and EUR 2.7 million in third-party funding.

Conservation

In addition to the conservation monitoring of all measures on media works and business transactions, numerous preventive measures were carried out. A total of 5,000 meters of shelves containing media works were cleaned. Over 11,200 media works were processed in the subject areas of preservation, as well as 14,000 tears closed and over 10 meters of tape removed. In addition, 156,780 archival cardboard boxes were procured and over 3,300 measurements were taken on over 2,000 acidic media works.

General information on cataloguing

In 2022, 154,993 books, periodicals, maps, music, sound recordings and other physical media works were newly indexed in terms of form and content and thematically assigned to the DDC subject groups. 43,563 media works, especially from Series A of the National Bibliography, were indexed in greater depth in terms of content using keywords from the Integrated Authority File (GND) or notations from the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). In the GND, 25,651 persons, works, corporations, conferences, geographies and subject headings were newly recorded by the DNB. The National ISSN Center for Germany assigned an ISSN to approximately 2,522 journal titles and publication series.
Using mechanical methods, 709,494 online publications were assigned to subject groups. Of these, 162,286 media works were also machine-coded. 580,883 media works were assigned DDC short notations. Short notations have been used as a cataloguing tool since 2015. Short notations have been introduced for 53 of the total of one hundred subject groups; they are currently being developed for the other subject groups.

URN service: over 50 million objects from 436 partner institutions have been permanently referenced via the service since summer 2022.