ÖNB Digital Austrian National Library Digital Collections Portal

History and Founding

ÖNB Digital is the online digital collections portal of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library), Austria's largest library with over 12 million items. The portal serves as the primary gateway to the National Library's digitized holdings. The Austrian National Library itself traces its origins to the medieval imperial library of the Habsburgs; it was renamed the Austrian National Library in 1920 following the end of the Habsburg Monarchy. The ÖNB Digital portal was developed as part of the library's broader digitization strategy, gaining significant scale through the Austrian Books Online (ABO) project — a public-private partnership with Google begun in 2011 — which has digitized over 600,000 out-of-copyright volumes comprising more than 200 million pages.

Collections and Holdings

The ÖNB Digital portal provides free online access to a wide range of digitized materials:

• Over 600,000 historical books from the Austrian Books Online project (post-1501, out of copyright)
• 28 million pages from historical newspapers and magazines
• 5 million pages of historical legal and statutory texts
• 400,000 additional items including photographs, graphics, manuscripts, maps, and musical scores

The portal supports full-text search through OCR-processed documents, enabling researchers to search within digitized books and newspapers. Collections are organized around thematic areas, including music (with major Beethoven and Bruckner holdings), manuscripts and rare books, papyri, globes, and materials related to women's and gender studies (through the Ariadne department, founded 1992). The library has also archived websites since 2009.

Notable Materials Related to Journalism and Media

The historical newspaper digitization project, covering 28 million pages, makes the ÖNB Digital portal a major resource for researching Austrian and Central European press history. Researchers can access full runs of historical Austrian and broader German-language newspapers and periodicals.

Access and Usage

All digitized materials available in the public domain are freely accessible online at onb.digital without registration. The portal supports browsing by theme and full-text search. Physical access to the National Library's collections is available at the Neue Burg Wing of the Hofburg in central Vienna (Heldenplatz), with five reading rooms open daily 9am–9pm.