Overview
- The culture minister rejected the fifth expansion of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Leipzig after years of planning, with project costs trimmed to about €100 million and roughly €7 million already spent.
- The library says magazine capacity in Leipzig is nearly exhausted and that the canceled annex—planned at 17,200 square meters—was designed to secure about 35.5 million works for roughly 30 years.
- Wolfram Weimer seeks to model legal deposit largely in digital form and to reduce mandatory physical copies to one, though current law requires two physical copies and any change would need parliamentary approval.
- Library, publishing and printing groups, including the German Library Association, the Börsenverein and the BVDM, condemned the halt as endangering preservation of printed cultural heritage.
- The DNB is reviewing alternatives such as relocating holdings to Frankfurt, noting continued intake of around 13,100 works per day, including about 3,300 analog and 9,800 digital items.