Indicator 11.4 Number of objects in the German Digital Library

Text from the Indicator Report 2022 

The German Digital Library is a platform created to connect the digital holdings of institutions like archives, libraries and museums. It is managed by a network of such repositories of culture and learning from the Federal Government, the Länder and local-authorities.

It is jointly funded by the Federal Government and the Länder. Most of the digital materials are held not by the German Digital Library itself but by partner institutions, while the DDB only hosts links to those objects. The partner institutions are responsible for the stability of the connection. As of May 2020, the number of partner institutions making data available for the German Digital Library had reached 448. The majority are museums or archives – 183 and 174 of them respectively.

The German Digital Library online platform has been accessible since 2012, at which point it hosted links to 5.6 million objects. By the middle of 2022, that number had risen to 42.3 million. If the trend continues as it has to date, the target of 50 million by 2030 could be achieved. Some of the objects made available by libraries may repeat the same content; for example, two libraries might post links in the German Digital Library to the same edition of a book. In such cases, the two links are counted separately.

Since 2015, it has been possible to differentiate between objects with and without digitised media. For those with digitised content, the German Digital Library link gives direct access to the digitised reproduction of the book, certificate, painting or other object in question. For objects without digitised media, on the other hand, the links lead only to information about them. The link pertaining to a painting, for instance, will provide information about who painted it, what year it is from and where it is kept. Objects with digitised media thus provide a good deal more information than those for which only metadata are made available.

There were 6.3 million objects with digitised media at the end of 2015, rising to 14.9 million by the middle of 2022. Objects with digitised media also increased as a proportion of all the objects linked to in the German Digital Library, rising from around 34.5 % in 2015 to around 35.2 % by mid-2022. At the end of the first half of 2022, the majority of digitised objects available via the Library were texts (61.8 %), followed by pictures (34.9 %) and other media (2.8 %). In contrast, audio and video recordings made up only a very small proportion of digitised Library objects, at 0.3 % and 0.2 % respectively.

The synoptic table provides information about the evaluation of the indicator in previous years. It shows if the weather symbol assigned to an indicator was rather stable or volatile in the past years. (Evaluation of the Indicator Report 2022 )

Indicator	11.4 Number of objects in the German Digital Library
Target	Increase in the number of objects in the network of the German Digital Library to 50 million by 2030
Year	2018	2019	2020	2021
Evaluation