Royal Library at Berlin

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
(Berlin State Library)

Façade of house 'Unter den Linden'
Country	Germany
Type	Universal library
Established	1661
Location	Unter den Linden 8, Potsdamer Straße 33, Westhafenstraße 1, Berlin, Germany
Collection
Items collected	books, journals, newspapers, magazines, music autographs, databases, maps, prints, drawings, incunabula and manuscripts
Size	23,110,423 Consists of 12.3 million books; 206,700 rare books; 60,100 manuscripts; music autographs; 1,600 estate archives; 25,000 periodicals; 180,000 newspaper volumes; 4,300 databases; 2.7 million microfilms; 13.5 million images at the bpk
Legal deposit	Yes, German parliament and government publications
Access and use
Access requirements	any person over 16 years of age
Other information
Budget	~€16,000,000
Director	Barbara Schneider-Kempf
Website	www.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de

The Berlin State Library (German: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; officially abbreviated as SBB, colloquially Stabi) is a universal library in Berlin, Germany and a property of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. It is one of the largest libraries in Europe, and one of the most important academic research libraries in the German-speaking world. It collects texts, media and cultural works from all fields in all languages, from all time periods and all countries of the world, which are of interest for academic and research purposes. Among the more famous items in its collection are the oldest biblical illustrations, in the fifth-century Quedlinburg Itala fragment, a Gutenberg Bible, the main autograph collection of Goethe, the world's largest collection of Johann Sebastian Bach's and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's manuscripts, and the original score of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

The SBB is one of six libraries forming the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sammlung Deutscher Drucke (AG SDD) which "collaborate to build a comprehensive collection of printed literature published in German-speaking countries from the beginning of letterpress printing to the present, to provide information on it, to make it accessible to the public and to preserve it for future generations." This creates a virtual or distributed national library, in which each library is responsible for a given period, of which the SBB covers 1871 - 1912 for regular prints, 1801-1912 for maps and newspapers, and 1801-1945 for musical scores.

Within the cooperation of German and Austrian libraries, the SBB is responsible "for the maintenance and further development of the ZDB", the central periodicals database. "The ZDB actually contains more than 1.8 million bibliographic records of serials from the 16th century onward, from all countries, in all languages, held in 3.700 German and Austrian libraries, with 15.6 million holdings information. It does not contain contents, i. e. journal articles."