The Oriental Department holds all of Staatsbibliothek's Oriental manuscripts and a part of the East Asian manuscripts as well as Tibetan and Mongolian block prints, photocopies, facsimile editions and microfilms of Oriental manuscripts.

In addition to more than 42,000 volumes of original manuscripts, current holdings also include over 180,000 films. These films primarily contain manuscripts from Nepal that originated from the "Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project." The Oriental Department also provides library services and conservational supervision for about 40,000 text fragments of the Berlin Turfan Collection. Part of these fragments are a deposit of Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften while another part is property of Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. More fragments are held at Museum für Asiatische Kunst.

Since the DFG-project "Orient Digital" started in August 2020, the metadata of all Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts are collected in Qalamos. The portal lists the classmarks and essential metadata of all Berlin manuscripts. The number of detailed descriptions is growing continuously and already includes all digitised manuscripts. The migration of the Turfan collection metadata to the portal will be completed soon.

Access to the Nepal films was provided by the "Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project" in Hamburg.