Dr. Markus Brantl

The Munich Digitisation Centre (MDZ)

The Munich Digitisation Centre (MDZ) at the Bavarian State Library (BSB) can now look back upon ten years' experience with retro-digitisation. Today, the Centre is Germany's largest archive of retrodigitised content, free-of-charge and available online. The Centre was initially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as one of two national digital competency centres. Upon conclusion of the Foundation's support in 2001, the Centre joined the Library's collections department, becoming an integral part of the Library's service spectrum. The Bavarian State Library is one of Europe's pre-eminent research libraries. This presentation offers a brief overview of the Munich Digitisation Centre. It describes the Centre's role in the development of digital collections at the Bavarian State Library on the cusp of mass digitisation.