We are one library located at different sites:

• At the Haus Unter den Linden readers find our historic collections.

• At the Haus Potsdamer Straße readers find our modern collections.

The general collections published after 1851 can be consulted at both sites. The materials of the special collections departments (manuscripts, sheet music, maps, rare books, etc.) can only be consulted in the respective special reading rooms.

For using the library, reading rooms, access to electronic resources and all other Stabi services you need to register for a library card. With a library card and a library account you can order books and access all our electronic offers. The library card is free of charge and valid for both sites of the Staatsbibliothek.

Library cards might be checked at random when you enter the reading rooms.

The stabi can be used by anyone aged 14 and over. Minors need a Einverständniserklärung (declaration of consent) of their parent or legal guardian.
For university institutions, companies and other legal entities, we offer a joint library card for multiple authorised users.

• You need a library card (registration free of charge, from the age of 14).
• With a library card, you may order media from StabiKat to borrow books for use at home or in the Reading Room (it is recommended to do this 1 to 2 days in advance), as well as access remotely to electronic resources.
• Short tutorials help to navigate reading rooms, services and how to use the library for studying. Videos are subtitled in English and German.
• Lockers for your bags and backpacks are provided in both buildings.
• You can take electronic devices as well as beverages in closable bottles into the General Reading Rooms.
• Wi-Fi is available in all Reading Rooms.
• You find a Café and copy center in both buildings.

The largest part of the holdings is kept in the closed stacks of the two main sites or in the remote store and can be ordered electronically via the catalogue.

Only a small part of the holdings of the Staatsbibliothek is shelved in our general and special reading rooms, where they are freely accessible. These books are for reference only (bibliographies, reference works, manuals, etc.). They cannot be taken out and can only be consulted in the library.

If you plan to work in the library's reading rooms, you may register online for a library card in advance.  You can also book a study desk, a carrel or a group study room online for free.

You can register for a library card online or on site. A renewal can be made via online renewal or in person in the library. Please come to the registration point at the Information & Service desk (Site Unter den Linden) or the registration point at the lending desk (Site Potsdamer Straße).

Registration for a library card at the State Library is free of charge for both individuals and legal entities. There are also no costs for extending the validity of your library card.

If you report your library card to us as lost, we will charge you € 5 for the issue of a replacement card. Please contact our Registration.

Borrowing books to take home is possible with a valid library card and proof of residence in Germany.
Generally, you can take home books from the year of publication 1913 onward, depending on their condition and any additional restrictions. Generally excluded are items from the reading room collection, large-format volumes, particularly valuable books, and items that are loaned to the reading room only for preservation reasons, such as loose-leaf publications and unbound journals. See also How and where can I collect my requested items?

Yes, with an online registration, ordering books to the reading room during a period of 14 days after registration and using electronic resources is possible even before a first visit. Online registration is valid for 30 days and can be extended by issuing a library card on site, valid for one year. For more information, see the website Registration | Library Card.

In your library account you can see the status of your requests, items on loan and due dates. You can renew borrowed items yourself.

All information regarding your password is available at Passwort-Center. There you can change the assigned password (date of your birth, six digits) and create a new safe password.

Updates of your personal data and adress information are made upon presentation of the respective documents (identity card or passport and certificate of residence) either at the Information & Service Desk (site Unter den Linden) or the lending desk (site Potsdamer Straße). You cannot change these data directly in your library account.

If you indicate your email address, you will receive email notifications for your interlibrary loan requests and also for items which you have reserved.

Email notifications for standard requests will not be sent.

You will also receive a reminder email 4 days before your borrowed items are due for return. This includes items requested to the reading room as well as items borrowed for home study.

After searching in the catalogue you can order the desired items by clicking on the button 'Request'. Type in the number of your library card and the password (the default password is your date of birth in the format DDMMYY), then you select where you wish to collect the item and confirm with 'Request/ Reserve'.

Items which readers requested to either the collection area at the site Potsdamer Straße or to the lending desk at the site Unter den Linden are kept for seven days.

If a book (an item) is already on loan, you have the possibility to make a reservation. You will be notified when the item is ready for you. Then you have seven days to collect the item.

If you wish to order an issue of a journal or newspaper, please first click on the link 'zugehörige Publikationen', bottom left of the title details. Then you find a list of most volumes of the requested journal and can order the desired volume. In the list you can select either year or volume and place your order.

If you do not find the year or volume in the list, you have another way to submit an order. You can use the link 'Bestellen' next to the details on volumes/years.

A valid library card allows you to order up to 60 items online via the StabiKat catalogue. The catalogue indicates whether books can be borrowed for use at home or in the reading rooms.

There is no regulation of the order quantity for owners of a legal entity library card.

When placing your request / reservation you can select where you want to collect the items:

• site Potsdamer Straße, Book collection area - for external use
• site Potsdamer Straße, Reading room loans
• site Unter den Linden, Reading room loans

Items that you have ordered for the General Reading Rooms can be found directly at the reading room loans of the respective reading room. The volumes are there during the entire loan period.

Borrowed items for use at home can be collected in the book collection area in the Haus Potsdamer Straße. These volumes can be picked up within 7 days of being made available during entire opening hours.

The status of your requests can be found in your library account. We will inform you about the status of your reservations as soon as your they are provided.

That depends on different factors: location in the stacks, weekday and time of the day. You can check the status of your request in your library account.

When you order an item after 1pm, the requested item would be delivered on the next day at the earliest. Orders placed on Friday after 1pm and orders placed on Saturday or Sunday will be processed on Monday. Requested books which you wish to take home will be held in the collection area for seven days (Potsdamer Straße exclusively).

Materials of the special departments can mostly be requested and consulted in the respective special reading rooms.

In your library account you can see if your item is ready for collection. When you log in to your account with your library card number and your password, you can see on the left side at 'Loans' your orders and borrowed items. Reservations can be checked in a separate section.
If you want to see your current orders or what is available to collect: on the right side you can change the sorting order to 'return date desc.'.

You have one week to collect your requested items.

Items which you have requested to the reading room, will be available for consultation for a period of 30 days. At the end of this period we will return the items to the stacks. After an internal processing time of five days the items can be reordered.

When you have reserved items, the notification gives you the information how many days the items will be ready to collect. As a rule, the time limit is seven days.

If a reserved book has been returned by the previous user and is made available for you, you will receive an email from us, or you can track the status of your reservations yourself in your library account.

If the item you requested cannot be supplied, a notification will be sent to your library account where you find it under ‚Loans‘: "keine Bereitstellung möglich" = "cannot be made available". 
The section ‚additional information' gives the reasons for it. For more information, please contact our information desks on site or send us a message. 

Items that you have borrowed for use outside the library can be returned to both locations.

In the entrance hall of Haus Potsdamer Straße you can use an automated book return during the opening hours (Mon - Sat 8am - 10pm, Sun 10am - 6pm) . It is located left of the registration desk. When you return your volumes there, they are immediately removed from your library account and you will receive an email with a return receipt.
For media that you cannot return at the automated book return, you will find a return trolley in the foyer outside the service hours of the issue desk (Mon - Fri 10 am - 6 pm, Sat 10 am - 2 pm) at the entrance control. No return receipt will be issued there.

In the Haus Unter den Linden, books can be returned at the Information & Service Desk; there you will also receive a receipt. Outside service hours you have following options to return books without a receipt:

• at the entrance control to the Reading Room (media return box)
• in front of the Information & Service Desk (book trolley)
• at the Reading Room loans (book trolley)

Please return items that you borrowed via interlibrary loan to the lending desk or the Information & Service Desk during service hours.

Please place volumes that you have used in the reading room at Haus Potsdamer Straße on a book return shelf in the middle of the Reading Room loans on the 2nd floor.

If you have lost a borrowed item, you must first fill out the so called Loss Statement, sign it and hand it in at the lending desk or send it to the lending desk by e-mail as a scan. (ausleihe@sbb.spk-berlin.de)

After receipt of the declaration of loss, the item will be deleted from your library account. After a processing period, which may take several weeks, you will be charged for the replacement value of the item plus a flat-rate administration fee of 15 Euros. The administration fee is charged per item. Please refrain from making your own replacement purchases. Unfortunately, we cannot accept these.

Please note that you will receive a request for payment by mail as a PDF or by letter post for the replacement. This demand as well as all other open charges will be displayed in your library account in total. From a sum of 66 Euros, a blocking of the account will start automatically. To avoid this, we recommend that you pay the outstanding fees in time.

Please contact one of our reference desks, if you are not sure whether a publication is actually not in the Staatsbibliothek's holdings. During our service hours you can reach us by telephone on +49 30 266 433 888. 
If you need literature that we do not have in stock, you can place an interlibrary loan order - Fernleihbestellung.

Particularly valuable volumes can only be ordered for use in the Rare Books Reading Room.
These include:

• Volumes published prior to 1851.
• Volumes from the historical collection with usage restriction 'For reading room use only under supervision' (NfLSu.A.).
• Volumes from 1851 onwards with high-quality illustrations (original graphics, engravings, lithographs, hand-colored prints, and other illustrations in special printing techniques, etc.).
• Volumes that violate legal provisions, especially those that are harmful to minors, pornographic, incite hatred, or are related to National Socialism.

During the ordering process, only the location 'Rare Books Reading Room' will be displayed for the relevant volumes.

We ask you to respect the special conditions of use in the Rare Books Reading Room: In addition to your library card, a personal identification document must also be presented. It is not ok to bring water bottles into this reading room.

The regular loan period is 30 calendar days. It is possible to renew 12 times online, more information.

Provided that you have indicated your email address, you will receive a reminder email four days before the end of the loan period for your borrowed media which you use either at home or in the reading rooms.

Please consider that this is only an additional service of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Overdue fines for books/ items which were returned too late will not be waived, they still must be paid. Therefore you should always check when your borrowed items are due for return.

You should extend the loan period for your media lent for reading room use online in your library account no later than the last day of the loan period. If there is no timely extension of the loan period, the media will usually be cleared out by us on the following day and booked back. Please keep in mind that the media can only be reordered 5 days after the chargeback.

You will receive a reminder by email or by post. These reminders are generated automatically. You will also have to pay an overdue fine for every single item. You can find more information about the overdue notice procedure and conditions here.

You have different options:

• with a German EC-Card
  • at Haus Unter den Linden on the 1st floor at the Information & Service Desk
  • at Haus Potsdamer Straße on the ground floor at the Lending Desk, or,
• by bank transfer.

Cash payment is not possible.

Loans are not automatically extended when you pay overdue charges or fines. Please renew the items in your library account yourself.

You can renew items for which you have received a reminder.
Up to the third reminder you can online renew such items. If you receive a fourth reminder, renewals are no longer possible. Your library account will then be blocked until the borrowed volumes are returned.

Your library account will be blocked automatically if the fee exceeds € 66 or if you have received a fourth reminder.

Please find further information here under the heading "Cloakroom" on this page.

There is a library café in both buildings: in the Haus Unter den Linden on the ground floor, in the Haus Potsdamer Straße on the 1st floor, behind the entrance control.

Yes, registered readers can use WiFi in the library buildings.
To have access to eduroam you can also use the access details of your home institution.
For more information please refer to the WiFi website and to the Wifi setup tutorial.

In both houses you may reserve carrels and at the Haus Unter den Linden you may reserve additionally a study desk including a Stabibox (cart). Please note, there may be waiting lists.

A carrel is available at both locations for people with severe disabilities. Please enquire about free capacities via raumbuchung@sbb.spk-berlin.de / using the keyword "Carrel."

Reading room loans are placed back on the same shelf as long as the loan period has not expired.

At Haus Unter den Linden you can reserve a StabiBox (cart in combination with a study desk). At Haus Potsdamer Straße there are as well Stabiboxes (here it will be a permanent locker) available.

Yes, of course. In both buildings readers may scan and copy.

Yes, you can order Digital Copies online for the digitisation of copyright-free works (70 years after the author died).
You may have your own materials digitised in the Copy Centre.

For undisturbing phone calls, we offer a soundproof telephone booth in the Haus Potsdamer Straße on the level of the cafeteria, right at the window facade, the other booth is located in the entrance hall just beside the bag vending machine. 

Don't forget to mute your mobile phone in the reading rooms to preserve the quiet working atmosphere.