General information on the collection of physical media and online publications

Whether on paper or other carrier materials or in digital form, the German National Library collects books, journals and newspapers, sheet music, maps, standards, audiobooks, music, websites and more – without evaluation, in the original and as completely as possible. In 2024, a total of 3,414,514 million physical media works and online publications were newly added to the collection. The total holdings have grown to approximately 53,102,297 million media works.. One third of these are online publications.

Use

In 2024, the reading rooms of the German National Library were open on 297 days. They were visited 140,452 times. 274,575 media works were made available. 846 per day.

Digitisation

Last year, almost 110,000 works and around 2.2 million tables of content were digitised. – this corresponds nearly 8 million pages.
Currently, around 4.9 million tables of contents can be accessed via the catalog. They are viewed around 16,000 times a day.

Preservation

In addition to the conservational supervision of all media works and business processes, numerous preventive measures were carried out. A total of 5,000 metres of shelving containing media works were cleaned.
The quarantine rooms for collection preservation were also very busy in 2024. A total of almost 770 media works containing wooden models, graphics, coloured paper or historical sound recordings had to be quarantined because they were either infected with microbes or insects.

General information on cataloguing

In 2024, 137,815 books, journals, maps, sheet music, sound recordings, and other physical media were catalogued descriptively and by subject and assigned to the DDC subject groups. 32,525 media works, particularly those in series A of the National Bibliography, were catalogued in greater depth with keywords from the Integrated Authority File or notations from the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). The National ISSN Center for Germany assigned an ISSN to around 2,193 journal titles and series.

Projects

The German National Library has the task of cooperating with national and international library institutions and participating in the relevant professional organisations. In this context, it is an active partner in a large number of committees, collaborations, and projects.

Of the 28 current projects last year, 15 were funded by third parties, which corresponds to a rate of 54% (2023: 54%, 2022: 42%).