The Munich Digitization Center at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

Background, Foundation and Tasks

In Summer 1997 the Munich Digitization Center (MDC) was founded at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB; Bavarian State Library). It was the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Association) that had initiated the foundation of two so-called centers of excellence at two libraries which had already some experience in digitization. In parallel the DFG established a new grant program, named “Retrospective Digitization of library holdings” that currently sponsors about 50 projects. This program intends to encourage libraries to work up digitally library holdings with interest for researchers, holdings that exist only in print form, and to offer them freely to everybody via the WWW. The processing and presentation should realize not only universal access but also recognizable added value in search and retrieval compared to the print version. Together with the funding programs “Electronic Publishing and Virtual Subject Libraries” and “Modernisation and Rationalisation” the program “Retrospective Digitization of library holdings” aims towards a future vision of a distributed digital research library.