German National Library of Science and Technology


The German National Library of Science and Technology, abbreviated TIB, is the national library of the Federal Republic of Germany for all fields of engineering, technology, and the natural sciences. It is jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the 16 German states. Founded in, the library operates in conjunction with the Leibniz Universität Hannover. In addition to acquiring scientific literature, it conducts applied research in such areas as the archiving of non-textual materials, data visualization and the future Internet. The library is also involved in a number of open access initiatives. With a collection of about 8.9 million items in 2012, the TIB is the largest technology and natural science library in the world.
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Collection

The TIB acquires literature in all engineering fields as well as architecture, information technology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and other basic sciences. It is a particular specialist in the acquisition of "gray literature"; that is, literature difficult to obtain and not available via the standard book or journal trade. It also holds a large number of standards, norms, patents, source data, scientific conference proceedings, government research papers and dissertations. Special collections include the "Albrecht Haupt Collection" of digitally rendered architectural drawings, and a regional focus on technical literature from East Asia and Eastern Europe. The film and audiovisual material held previously by IWF Knowledge and Media is now held by TIB.
The TIB's holdings total 10 million media units :
  • 6.1 million books
  • 3.4 million non-electronic materials such as micro-materials
  • 143.3 million metadata in the index
  • about 54,650 licensed and digitized electronic journals
  • about 6,950 continuously held journals
  • about 6,560 subject databases
In 2010, the physical collection occupied of shelving.

Services

Open Research Knowledge Graph

To counteract the flood of publications in the sciences, TIB is developing the Open Research Knowledge Graph, with which the scientific contributions from scientific publications can be organized in a flexible database. In 2024, the TIB published the ORKG ASK service, which enables AI-supported scientific questions to be answered on the basis of a corpus of 80 million scientific publications.

DOI Registration Agency

In 2005 the TIB became the world's first Digital Object Identifier registration agency for research data sets in the fields of technology, natural sciences and medicine. It offers registration for the results of any publicly funded research conducted in Europe.

Depository library

The TIB is a legal deposit library for research projects sponsored by various agencies of the German Federal Government, in particular:

Leibniz Open Access Repository

The TIB is a member of the Leibniz Association, a consortium of 87 non-university research institutes in Germany. In support of the Association's open access goals, the TIB operates the Leibniz Open Access Repository in cooperation with Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. The TIB advises the Leibniz Association's various member organizations, scientists and staff on depositing publications in the repository according to open access guidelines.

Competence Center for Non-Textual Material

The amount, usage and importance of non-textual materials such as 3D models, AV media and research data is continually increasing and only a small proportion can be searched at the present time. The goal of the TIB Competence Centre for Non-Textual Materials is to fundamentally improve access to, and the use of, such non-textual materials. The TIB also develops new multimedia analysis methods such as morphology, speech or structure recognition to create indexing and metadata to help researchers and educators make better use of these complex materials. In addition, the competence center is dedicated to the preservation of multimedia objects, the assignment of DOI, and knowledge transfer.

GetInfo online service

TIB operates the GetInfo portal for science and technology with interdisciplinary search capabilities for the other German National Libraries as well as access to more than 150 million data sets from other specialized databases, publishers and library catalogs. The TIB also makes scientific videos of lectures, conferences, computer animations, simulations and experiments available via GetInfo. These video items can be searched free-of-charge and can be downloaded via Flash Player.

Partnerships

The TIB partners with a variety of national and international libraries, institutions and associations.

Goportis library network

The TIB is one of three partners in the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information consortium Goportis, the others being the German National Library of Economics and German National Library of Medicine. This initiative develops and operates online search services, online full-text delivery services, licensing agreements, non-textual materials, document preservation efforts, data storage, and open access.

Institutional partners

The TIB is also the scientific information provider for researchers in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, including Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Ukraine. It also collaborates with numerous organizations in China, Japan and Eastern Europe. Notable institutional partnerships include:

Other partners

Research projects

As part of the German national research infrastructure, the TIB conducts its own applied research, particularly in the field of information science. In cooperation with a variety of other institutions, these projects focus on the areas of visual searching, data visualization, the Semantic Web, and the Future Internet.

PROBADO 3D

PROBADO is a project to develop tools for the automatic indexing, storage and delivery of non-textual documents such as 3D models. Its goal is to enable academic libraries to deal with multimedia objects just as easily as with textual information. Tools include searching by intuitive drawing in 2D and 3D and delivery of results while drawing. For this initiative the TIB partnered with the Technical University of Darmstadt, the University of Bonn and the Technical University of Graz.

Visual access to research data

This project, funded by the Leibniz Association, is a joint effort of the TIB, the GRIS Darmstadt and the IGD. It deals with developing approaches to the interactive, graphical access to research data in order to make it easily represented and searchable. The project is tasked with developing methods for data analysis, visual search systems, metadata-based searching and prototype implementation.

SCOAP3-DH

SCOAP3 is a global consortium of organizations in high energy physics, physics research centers and leading international libraries. Its goal is to convert essential journals in particle physics that are presently financed by subscriptions into open access journals with the support of the publishers. SCOAP3-DH is funded by the German Research Foundation, working in cooperation with the German Electron Synchrotron and the Max Planck Society.

Other research projects

Additional TIB research projects include:arXiv-DH: development the Open Access platform arXiv for German universities and other institutionsDP4lib: development of a reusable and flexible infrastructure for digital preservationKnowledge Exchange: a national initiative in Germany to extend the use of information and communications technology in research and teachingKomFor: a Center of Expertise for Earth and Environment research dataLinked Heritage: metadata, standards, persistent identification and linked data systems for digital cultural heritage in EuropeSTI Adaptations to Mobile Web Devices: approaches for enhancing access to STI through mobile devicesTIB-Transfer: development and implementation of a concept for the commercialization of research resultsViFaChem II: development of concepts and tools for the Virtual Library of Chemistry II