Munich (dpa / lby) – The Bavarian State Library has cracked the three million mark when digitizing its collection. The three millionth work in the online library is a volume of poetry by the Ukrainian author Olena Teliha (1906-1942), as the Bavarian State Library announced on Wednesday. The volume was published in Munich in 1946 – about four years after the Ukrainian poet and resistance fighter was murdered by the German occupiers.
Teliha’s Ukrainian poems now complement the 400 million image files in the collection, which also includes scans of the Gutenberg Bible, Hartmann Schedel’s world chronicle and preliminary drawings of Philipp Apian’s “big map” of Bavaria.
For 25 years, the Bavarian State Library has been trying to make its “copyright-free holdings and collections from many centuries digitally accessible for science, research and the general public”. With a few exceptions, the collection can be accessed online and downloaded free of charge. According to its own statements, the library has the largest digital database of all German libraries.
