Journals Before 1945

Amongst its most outstanding holdings, the BBF owns a collection of periodicals with more than 15,000 titles spanning the years 1690 to 1945.

This collection of periodicals comprises journals, newspapers and yearbooks from a wide range of disciplines and organs. The many subject didactic journals and journals from regional and national associations are particularly worth mentioning.

The collection is relevant across regions, and it can be used to pursue various angles by researchers in the disciplines of pedagogy and educational history. Researchers from many related disciplines will find this rich body of sources interesting too, e.g. historians, linguists, cultural scientists, scientists from the history of art or natural sciences.

This collection is stored in three separate locations: journals published between 1850 and 1945 have been indexed in the library catalog, bearing the shelf mark “2 A“. These journals are placed at the users’ disposal in the library. Journals published until 1850 belong to the collection of “Old Prints” – they need to be ordered from the closed stacks as the school programms and annual school reports.

All the journals – save part of the annual school reports – have been indexed in our library catalog as well as the German database of journals (ZDB).

A broad scope of journals have meanwhile been digitized, e.g. gerneral educational, school educational journals and journals on religious pedagogy, school programmes and annual school reports. In these cases, all of the respective journals’ articles were indexed in the library catalog. The digitized objects can be openly accessed on the BBF digital library, Scripta Paedagogica. We provide these documents as images of individual pages as well as in PDF-format of single pages, articles and whole physical entities. The collection of journals on religious pedagogy is additionally made available as searchable full text.

The school programmes and annual school reports from Berlin,  Brandenburg and Pomerania have been filmed and are available as microfilms, please consult the page on the school programmes and annual school reports for more information.

Please note that for reasons of preservation, you are not allowed to make any copies from this holdings yourself but you may order reproductions.