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BioLib
"BioLib - Kurt Stübers Online Library" is a digital collection of historical books dealing with biology and closely related subjects. The books are usually fully digitised from beginning to end and archived page-wise as facsimile picture files. Some books were additionally retyped for BioLib; sometimes OCR software was used (optical character recognition). Many of the books contained in BioLib appeared before 1930. As the copyright holders have been dead for more than 70 years the copyright is void. Most of the books are not available in bookshops, and are usually difficult to find in libraries or antiquarian bookshops. Many of the titles are richly illutrated with pictorial plates of plants and animals. All retro digitised books in BioLib are freely available, online, to interested readers. (Please note the remarks concerning copyright of the digitised version in individual cases). At present there are two alternatives for the use of BioLib:
- In the first case, you may navigate page-wise on the website www.biolib.de with the help of content overviews and page preview pictures in small format the books can be viewed comfortably, without having to download large amounts of data. The presentation is supplemented with a consolidated index of all depicted organisms.
- In the second case, you may download the complete books as PDF files; for this purpose they are deposited in the digital repository of the University Library, Frankfurt and permanently archived. You may choose between a number of resolutions or file sizes.
The BioLib concept, the programming of the website www.biolib.de and important parts of the digitising work are due to Dr. Kurt Stüber and many unpaid helpers. The items for digitising were placed at our disposal by numerous libraries and individuals. The preparation of the PDF versions was carried out within the framework of the Virtual Library of Biology at the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main.
At present, some 300 titles are on the publication server as PDF files. The new accessions that are placed at relatively short intervals on www.biolib.de are transferred, in packets, about once a year to the document server. The presence of the titles is noted primarily via the online catalogue of the University Library Frankfurt and the Virtual Catalogue of Biology; in addition direct access is possible via the repository itself as well as via various union catalogues.
