The Max Planck Society buys entire Springer Book Archives

The Max Planck Society has bought the entire Springer Book Archives (SBA), which consists of 110,000 individual titles. The purchase gives staff in 82 Max Planck institutes in Germany direct online access to the retro-digitised books via the SpringerLink platform.

The Springer Book Archives contain the digital copies of nearly all the books published by Springer from 1842, when the publishing house was founded, up to and including 2004. The works are divided into 11 collections in English (around 56,000 titles) and five in German (around 54,000 titles). Although scientific works published by Springer Verlag account for the majority of publications the Springer Book Archives contain around 50 different imprints.

'The Springer Book Archives books had only been available a short time before the Max Planck institutes signalled their interest in acquiring these titles,’ explained Ralf Schimmer, head of scientific information provision at the Max Planck Digital Library. ‘We would like to congratulate Springer on implementing this fantastic retro-digitisation project, and we are pleased to be able to make this historical body of work available to researchers in the Max Planck Society in today’s digital working environment.’