The project

The German and the foreign law have been one of the most important collections of Berlin State Library, since it was founded in 1661. Therefore the library keeps the largest holdings of historical legal sources and scholarly law literature within the German speaking area.

Numerous books from the publication period from 1801-1900 are rare or unique literature. Particularly since the founding of the German Empire, the centrality of the Berlin State Library needs to be considered. During the 19th century, both common law and several particular laws co-existed with one another. Due to their limited scope and extent, their almost infinite variety was frequently disregarded by the research community. In order to neutralise this distortion of perception, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has been supporting systematic digitisation of the core of the State Library’s academic legal collection of German Territorial Law from 1801 to 1900. The respective holdings have a collection size of about 12,500 volumes and approximately 2.5 million pages. Together with some other national supported digitisation projects (see Links), which contents can be accessed worldwide and free as well, a solid base is being built up to provide the complete holdings of Berlin State Library’s German legal historic resources to the international research community in digital format in future.

The digitised materials can be searched on this project website, and via the Berlin State Library’s on-line catalogue, as well as by using the Alten Realkatalog’s contemporary systematic.