As early as 2009, the establishment of a Deutschen Digitalen Bibliothek was decided on, supported by an administrative and financial agreement into reality. To establish and expand the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, a competence network of 13 cultural and knowledge institutions (today 18) was founded to support the project. Since then, we have received financial support from the federal government and the states.
The Berlin office is home to the finance, legal, communications, and marketing departments. In contrast, the technical and development departments and the service center for technical support of our data partners (cultural heritage institutions) are located in Frankfort on the Main.
In 2012 we started with our beta version and initially 5.6 million objects or object records. The launch of our full version followed in 2014. In 2018, the federal and state governments decided to fund the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek sustainably: Since then, we have grown steadily, implemented many projects, and today (as of May 2023) can point to more than 750 data-supplying cultural institutions and almost 50 million digitally available cultural assets.
We have written our story here in detail.
Our partners: cultural heritage and knowledge institutions in Germany
How do holdings and collections get into the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek? The digitization of objects takes place in the museums, libraries, archives, preservation, and research institutions themselves. Cultural heritage and knowledge institutions register with the Deutschen Digitalen Bibliothek (see "Delivering Data" on DDBpro) and deliver the digital data on their holdings to us. For future data partners, further information can be found on DDBpro, our website.
Archive Portal-D, German Newspaper Portal, and the portal "Collection Material from Colonial Contexts" of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek
In the Archive Portal-D of the Deutschen Digitalen Bibliothek, digitized archival material is made accessible in a section-specific and detailed manner. Since 2020, archival material on the Weimar Republic can be researched in the thematic portal on this era. In 2022, the topic portal Restitution of National Socialist Injustice was published.
The German Newspaper Portal provides access to historical newspapers with a full-text search, alternative search entries by publication date or newspaper title, and a full-text viewer. In this way, the portal makes the diverse historical newspaper landscape accessible in a centralized and user-friendly manner.
The portal " Collection material from colonial contexts" makes already digitized and indexed collection material from colonial contexts available online within the Deutschen Digitalen Bibliothek and thus creates transparency.
Europeana: Networking European Cultural Heritage
As the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, we are Germany's contribution to Europeana, the European cultural heritage portal. As a national aggregator, we deliver bundled metadata and objects from German cultural institutions to Europeana, making them visible in a pan-European context.