Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek German Digital Library DDB

Overview

The German Digital Library (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; DDB) is Germany's central online portal for digitised cultural and scientific heritage. Jointly funded by the federal government and the German states, it aggregates digital objects contributed by hundreds of libraries, museums, archives, and research institutions across Germany, making them freely accessible to the public in one centralised location.

History and Founding

The DDB was established in 2009 as a publicly funded initiative. Its administrative office has been based at the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) in Berlin since August 2011. A beta version of the online portal was launched in 2012 with 5.6 million objects, and the full release version went online in 2014. The DDB is governed by a network of 18 cultural heritage and scientific institutions that contribute expertise to its establishment and operation, including the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, the Bundesarchiv, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Deutsches Museum. The DDB serves as an accredited aggregator for Europeana, active since 2012.

Collections and Holdings

As of 2025, more than 400 institutions have contributed over 24 million objects to the DDB. Collections span books and texts, archival materials, images, photographs, sculptures, audio documents, films, sheet music, manuscripts, and more—representing the full breadth of materials held by German museums, libraries, archives, and media libraries. Objects are accompanied by licensing information and usage rights. The DDB also hosts virtual exhibitions and maintains a subportal for collections from colonial contexts. All metadata available under CC0 licence can be accessed via a publicly available API.

Access and Usage

The portal is freely accessible at www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de. No registration is required for browsing and searching; user accounts allow saving of search results. Cultural heritage institutions wishing to contribute their collections can do so through DDBpro. The DDB also provides tools such as DDBstudio to help partner institutions curate their digital collections.