Berlin State Library

The Berlin State Library (German: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin; officially abbreviated as SBB, colloquially Stabi) is a universal library in Berlin, Germany, and a property of the German public cultural organization the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (German: Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz).

Founded in 1661, it is among the largest libraries in Europe, and one of the most important academic research libraries in the German-speaking world. It collects texts, media and cultural works from all fields across many languages, from all time periods and all countries of the world, and offer them for academic and research purposes.

Prominent items in its collection include the oldest biblical illustrations in the fifth-century Quedlinburg Itala fragment, a Gutenberg Bible, the main autograph collection of Goethe, the world's largest collection of Johann Sebastian Bach's and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's manuscripts, and the original score of Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

The SBB is one of six libraries forming the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sammlung Deutscher Drucke (AG SDD) which "collaborate to build a comprehensive collection of printed literature published in German-speaking countries from the beginning of letterpress printing to the present, to provide information on it, to make it accessible to the public and to preserve it for future generations." This creates a "distributed" national library, in which each library is responsible for a given period, of which the SBB covers 1871–1912 for regular prints, 1801–1912 for maps and newspapers, and 1801–1945 for musical scores.

Within the cooperation of German and Austrian libraries, the SBB is responsible "for the maintenance and further development of the ZDB", the central periodicals database. "The ZDB actually contains more than 1.8 million bibliographic records of serials from the 16th century onward, from all countries, in all languages, held in 3700 German and Austrian libraries, with 15.6 million holdings information. It does not contain contents, i. e. journal articles."

The SBB is one of 12 libraries and archives with significant holdings of historical documents which form the Allianz Schriftliches Kulturgut Erhalten (DE) (English: Alliance to Preserve Written Cultural Heritage). This alliance sets itself as main task raising the consciousness of the importance to preserve the century-old cultural heritage both by securing the physical integrity of the objects in question as well as making them available in digitized form, thus preventing their deterioration by use.

The SBB itself is digitizing its holdings and offers digitized newspapers for public access via the Web through their "newspaper information system" ZEFYS, or Zeitungsinformationssystem. ZEFYS "currently provides total of 281990 issues from 192 historical newspapers from Germany and foreign newspapers in german."

The history of the Berlin State Library closely parallels that of German history. It has lived through creation, neglect, expansion, war damage, division, unification and re-creation like few other libraries.