Library

The Übersee-Museum has a reference library, which serves the scientific work in the house – but is also open to the public. The library’s collection is oriented towards the research and exhibition profile of the specialist departments in the building, and is processed and constantly expanded accordingly. Printed or electronic media, about 60,000 monographs and journal volumes from ethnology, natural sciences, trade studies and colonial history can be found here. The library currently maintains scientific document exchanges with 449 national and international partner institutions.

The roots of the library go back to the “Physical Society” founded in 1776 as well as the “Society Museum”, since 1876 called “Municipal Collections for Natural History and Ethnography”, two predecessors of today’s Übersee-Museum. Partly from these contexts, the library today contains some “treasures” of the 18th and 19th century from various scientific fields. Among them, for example, travel descriptions by James Cook, published in 1785 or the “Description of some lesser-known sea animals and their features”, written by Johann Babtist Bohadsch in 1776 – as well as others.

To the online catalog