A newspaper rack in the Press Documentation Division © DBT/studio kohlmeier

The Press Documentation Division of the German Bundestag provides early-morning information every day on the main topics of the day (“press dossier”), which can be accessed throughout the parliamentary area from 8.00 a.m. onwards on the Bundestag’s Intranet. Around 22 national and regional publications are monitored to produce the dossier.

For the electronic press archive, which was set up in 1999 and is only accessible to Members and persons employed in the Bundestag, articles from around 50 German and international newspapers and magazines are indexed every day. Using keywords, staff from the Division index and archive between 500 and 600 articles each day, using a thesaurus developed specifically for the electronic archive. Electronic indexing allows searches to be carried out using full text or keywords based on thematic, geographical and biographical criteria.

Historical newspaper collection

In the conventional press archive ("old archives"), around 23 million paper-based press clippings from the period 1949-1999 are available to the user. These are also indexed using thematic, geographical and personal subject headings. The Press Documentation Division also has a comprehensive historical newspaper collection containing around 4700 volumes as well as a caricature archive, also indexed using thematic, geographical and personal subject headings.

The Press Documentation Division’s information and search service carries out searches and compiles documentation in response to requests from Members, parliamentary bodies and employees of the Bundestag Administration. It also produces dossiers from the conventional and electronic archives and offers a biographical or thematic press-monitoring service. In the information and search service’s reading room, around 140 current German and international publications are available for consultation, some of which are transferred to microfilm on an ongoing basis.