The connection between the University of Göttingen and the English-speaking world has been strong from the very beginning: Its founder, George II, was not only Elector of Hanover but also King of Great Britain and Ireland.
After its foundation in the year 1734 the University of Göttingen rapidly developed into an institution of international standing. As a well-stocked library with a classified catalogue was essential for scientific research and teaching, the Royal University Library Göttingen was from the very first assembled systematically for the scholars' needs. The core of the collection, consisting of about 12,000 books, was formed by the private library of the High Reeve of Celle Joachim Hinrich von Bülow (1650-1724), but also held the duplicates of the Royal Library Hanover and the book collection of the Göttingen Grammar School.
The Hanoverian state minister and first university curator Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen (1688-1770) proved to be an effective supporter of the library. These favourable conditions allowed the library directors Johann Matthias Gesner (1734-1761) and Christian Gottlob Heyne (1763-1812) to assemble holdings of unprecedented completeness and range. Heyne was in charge of the library for almost 50 years and developed it to a model research library. As he wrote in 1810, he understood the significance of acquisition as follows:
"[C]ontinuous systematic acquisition of what is needed [...] for a library which is organised according to a scientific design, not according to predilection for a particular subject, not for ostentation, not for the lustre of outer appearance, but as a compendium encompassing the most important writings of all periods and peoples in all sciences."
The library holdings should document the progress of scientific research instead of recapitulating familiar facts.
Within just a few decades, Heyne created a dense network of contacts with foreign book dealers, diplomats and scholars to acquire literature from all over the world. Due to the personal union between Hanover and Great Britain which lasted until 1837 the book collection showed an emphasis on Anglo-American cultures; and as the University of Göttingen held close ties with Russia, the Slavic cultures formed a second focus. This profile was complemented by the natural sciences.
A number of catalogues indexed the holdings in an exemplary way. In addition to the shelf-register for the Bülow Collection, which was continued as an accession catalogue, an alphabetical catalogue was introduced in 1743, and a classified one in 1755. These retrieval aids were interlinked and formed the Göttingen Catalogue System.
The University Library was characterized by a liberal usage policy and soon allowed students to borrow books, which was not common at the time. This way, within a few decades the University Library Göttingen became the first modern universal library of European renown. Around 1800 it already comprised about 150,000 books. During the time of Heyne’s directorate the holdings had tripled.
After Heyne’s era, the development of the Royal University Library Göttingen lost momentum for a while, mainly because its budget was tighter than before. Besides, with the Prussian annexation of the Kingdom of Hanover, the role of the library had changed: The University of Göttingen lost its status as a privileged state university and its library became one of ten Prussian university libraries.
A favourable collection development in the beginning of the 20th century was interrupted by World War I with its political and economical consequences. To close the gaps inflicted by the war the Emergency Association of German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft) provided considerable support by the introduction of the Special Subject Collection programme. As the University Library Göttingen already offered particularly comprehensive holdings in a variety of subject fields, the subject collections "Anglo-American Culture" and "Natural Sciences" were entrusted to the house and additional financial resources were granted for the subject of Foreign Law.
The time of National Socialism meant another crisis for the library. Jewish and politically non-opportune librarians were dismissed or forced to retire, namely the medievalist and librarian Prof. Dr. Alfred Hessel (1877-1939), Dr. Fritz Löwenthal, Dr. Kurt Schellenberg, Dr. Wilhelm Vogt and Dr. Gerda Krüger. Illegitimate acquisitions in the Nazi era were investigated by the research project “Identification and Restitution of Nazi Loot” in 2008-2011.
The collection suffered from severe budget cuts, but was hardly damaged during the war. Thus, the library gained important functions for the interlibrary loan system in the following years. Recognizing its outstanding services in this area, the Lower Saxony State Ministry granted the title "Göttingen State and University Library" (Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, i.e. SUB Göttingen) in 1949.
Also in 1949, the German Research Foundation (DFG), which emerged from the Emergency Association of German Science, reorganised its Special Subject Collection Programme and entrusted the library with additional subject collections.
After rather difficult post-war years for the library, the electronic data processing (EDP) era began in 1967. With the adoption of the Dutch PICA system, the Lower Saxony Library Data Centre (Bibliotheksrechenzentrum für Niedersachsen, a former department of SUB Göttingen) developed into the Common Library Network (GBV) since 1993.
In the year 1992, the SUB Göttingen moved into a new building on the site of the Centre for Humanities. Since the official opening of the Central Library in 1993, the (now two) main buildings represent a functional division: The Central Library as a modern academic universal library, and the Historical Building as a centre for in-depth historical research. The refurbishment of the Historical Building, begun in 2000 and concluded in 2006, permitted to concentrate the library's special collections in one location. Today, the complete holdings of the SUB Göttingen comprise about 10 million media items.
Because of its extensive 18th century holdings, the Göttingen State and University Library serves as German National Library for the 18th century as a member of the Working Group “Sammlung Deutscher Drucke” and also organizes the DFG-funded project "Digitisation and Indexing of Printed Material Published in the 18th Century in the German-Speaking Areas (VD 18)". SUB Göttingen also took part in the project „Index of Printed Material Published in the 17th Century in the German-Speaking Areas“ (VD 17). Moreover, the library owns numerous collections of personal papers which are continously being indexed and a corpus of approximately 450 occidental medieval manuscripts whose cataloguing according to current DFG standards was begun in 2017.
Since 2015, the Special Subject Collection programme of the German Research Foundation was replaced by the Specialised Information Services (Fachinformationsdienste). By now, the SUB Göttingen has supported several of these Information Services:
The replacement of the Special Subject Collection Programme meant a change in many ways. Libraries had to rethink and reinvent a large part of their role for their users. Instead of acquiring a near-complete physical local collection and providing items out of this reservoir, the focus shifts on providing resources also from many other collections and sources and in a variety of different forms. As the SSG system had focused on print only, it had to be reformed to keep pace with the changes within scholarly publishing. Another reason for the particular design of the FID programme was the fact that the publishing cultures of the individual academic disciplines had evolved in very diverse ways. The FIDs allowed to tailor library services to the specific needs of the respective disciplines.
But no matter what changes the idea of the collection will undergo in the future – physical and digital library collections, be they local or conceived as national – will always be spaces of inspiration and sources of knowledge.
Enjoy exploring our collections!
For further reading please check the general list of publications!
