Preface

Die Deutsche Bibliothek^<1> is the national library and national bibliographic information centre for the Federal Republic of Germany. It is responsible for the collection, processing and bibliographic indexing of all German and German-language publications issued since 1913. Die Deutsche Bibliothek was established in 1990 on the basis of the Treaty of Unification in a merger of the existing institutions the Deutsche Bücherei Leipzig and the Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main, of which the Deutsches Musikarchiv Berlin is an integral part. Die Deutsche Bibliothek has a legal mandate to collect, index and permanently preserve the total of German-language publications and publications issued in Germany. The law also includes digital publications as far as they are supplied on physical carriers. Online publications are not yet covered by the legal mandate. For several years Die Deutsche Bibliothek jointly with publishers and producers has been testing the delivery, archiving and long-term preservation of online publications on this basis. In this work group "Electronic Deposit Library" the conditions were tested and negotiated under which Die Deutsche Bibliothek can act as archive also for online publications. Die Deutsche Bibliothek collects Electronic Theses and Dissertations since 1998. Metadata for ETDs are being reported by the university libraries to Die Deutsche Bibliothek in a standardized format. The electronic texts themselves are then actively and individually transferred by our library staff onto our archive server http://deposit.ddb.de. Until now, about 16.000 online dissertations have been collected following this procedure.

Footnotes:
<1>	http://www.ddb.de

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