Kontinuität der Krise, Krise der Kontinuität?

Die Forschung zur Geschichte wissenschaftlicher Bibliotheken im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland ist in den letzten Jahren durch zahlreiche Studien zu einzelnen Bibliotheken und Bibliothekaren sowie insbesondere auch durch die Konjunktur der NS-Provenienzforschung weiter vorangetrieben worden. Der Aufsatz greift diese Forschungen sowie neuere Ergebnisse der Wissenschaftsgeschichte auf, um den Blick auf einige zentrale zeitgenössische bibliothekspolitische Entwicklungen zu lenken. Dabei wird deutlich, wie sehr die durch den Ersten Weltkrieg und die Wirtschaftskrisen der Weimarer Republik ausgelösten krisenhaften Momente die Bibliotheken und das bibliothekspolitische Handeln der führenden Bibliothekare durchgängig prägten und ein spezifisches Interpretament für die Geschichte der wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus bildete, das sie von der Geschichte anderer Institutionen und Fächer im damaligen Wissenschaftsbetrieb unterschied.Research about the history of academic libraries during the Nazi period has made further progress in recent years by numerous studies about single libraries and individual librarians as well as by the strong momentum of provenance research. Referring to these results as well as to recent discussions in the field of science history the article is focusing on some central developments of contemporary library politics. This makes clear that the crisis triggered by the First World War and the economic difficulties of the Weimar Republic shaped the libraries and the library politics of the key actors and that distinguished the academic libraries in the time of national socialism from other institutions and disciplines of contemporary academic life

The Integration of Internet Resources into a Library’s Special Subject Services – the Example of the History Guide of the State and University Library of Goettingen

The Internet has created a unique type of media for scholarly information and publication, the subject-specific web site. Sometimes subject-specific web sites reveal still striking similarities to examples derived from the world of print, like electronic journals or text archives, but it is becoming more and more obvious that this is largely due to their authors’ adherence to traditional ways of thinking rather than to a lack of knowledge about the new type of media. It is beginning to get through that we have to cope with a new type of media requiring new organisational and technical models. It is crucial to understand how insufficient it would be to try to handle these new media types in the same way as their printed predecessors. Largely there are two reasons why subject-specific web sites require new approaches to dealing with them: unlike printed books web sites do not have a fixed status and even after making them available to the public they are often changed, revised, and enlarged. Once published they do not have a fixed status but are changing regularly. They are to a large degree dynamic compared to printed resources librarians are familiar with. And secondly they are representing networked information, which does not have to have a fixed place like a library building any more because it can be accessed from all over the world via the Internet