Promotion, support & cooperation
Our work relies on a strong network of supporters and partners. These include civic engagement, public funding and support from the media. We would like to express our sincere thanks for this cooperation. Together, we provide more than 63,000 students and interested citizens with academic literature. As a cultural center in Cologne, we also offer a diverse program of events. Funding and third-party funds also enable the restoration of our old holdings and support academics in their research and publication processes.
Culture
Thanks to the great support of a wide range of partners, we are able to protect cultural assets and offer a wide range of cultural activities in the form of events and exhibitions.
The Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation supports the restoration of (art) historically relevant book collections at the University and City Library of Cologne.
The Historical Archive in Cologne is one of the most important municipal archives in Europe and is often referred to as the written "Cologne city memory". It preserves a wealth of documents relating to the history of Cologne and the Rhineland and makes them accessible to the public. In addition to municipal documents and files, it also contains the estates and collections of well-known personalities.
Since 1985, the Cologne Women's History Association has been offering city tours, events and lectures, organizing exhibitions and publishing books, articles and brochures on Cologne's women's history. The association collects and archives documents on Cologne's women's/lesbian and migrant women's movement and its activists and campaigns for women to be inscribed in the city's history and for streets to be named after women.
In 1920, the year we were founded, we received the 40,000-volume grammar school library on permanent loan from the Cologne Grammar School and Foundation Fund. The Cologne Grammar School and Endowment Fund is currently financing the reconstruction of the Cologne Jesuit Library.
We have also been able to call Kölner Illustrierte our partner since 2018. Both media institutions support and accompany us in our diverse cultural program, be it the various exhibitions, lectures in our building or the popular panel discussions in which current topics are hotly debated.
Since 2010, the Kölnische Bibliotheksgesellschaft (KBG) has supported us financially and initiated numerous evening events, exhibitions and lectures. As a thank you for this commitment, our colleagues in the bookbindery and digitization center produce bibliophile annual editions in the form of special editions for all members under the motto: book typesetting, printing, cover design and production made by USB Cologne!
Under the motto "Partnership for more culture", WDR 3 works closely with over 100 cultural institutions in North Rhine-Westphalia. We were also able to win WDR 3 as our cultural partner, which has been supporting us since 2018.
The Rudolf-August Oetker Foundation is supporting the Hittorff Research Center in the restoration of the important library of the architect Jacob Ignaz Hittorff. Born in Cologne, he was also active in urban planning in 19th century Paris and designed, for example, the Gare du Nord, the Place de la Concorde and the famous blue Parisian street signs.
We would like to thank all book sponsors for their support in the "Wallraf's Books" project!
Projects
DFG funding has made it possible to develop services that are not only important for the University of Cologne, but also for science beyond the region: Thanks to support in retrospective digitization, our digital collections have been expanded. We are thus expanding the open access offering in the area of our historical holdings. As part of a DFG project, we are digitizing the Kölnische Zeitung from 1803-1945 together with the ULB Bonn. The full-text digitized copies will be available in the newspaper portal zeit.punktNRW in 2021.
Thanks to the support of the City of Cologne, the Cologne Archives and Libraries Emergency Network was launched in 2018, a long-planned process that began and was intensified after the collapse of the city archives. The members work together proactively, take precautions and train in the event of damage. This enables a coordinated response to emergencies, including support, material procurement, personnel deployment and cooperation with rescue services, which strengthens the cooperation and cohesion of cultural heritage preservationists in Cologne.
The Dreikönigsgymnasium and the USB both preserve the heritage of the former Jesuit College in Cologne. In addition, we are undertaking joint activities under the motto "DKG and USB - it fits!" For example, the DKG will be exhibiting the winners of the "Collecting like Ferdinand Franz Wallraf" competition in 2024 in the USB exhibition "A book is a place. Wallraf's Library for Cologne" in the Historical Archive with the Rheinisches Bildarchiv. Further joint activities are planned.
As the largest European infrastructure institution for the social sciences, GESIS provides fundamental, nationally and internationally significant research-based services for the social sciences. GESIS is supported by the German Sociological Association DGS.
The German Sociological Association DGS is the association of academically qualified sociologists in Germany. It currently has around 3,400 members, which means that around four-fifths of all sociologists in Germany with a doctorate belong to it.
The Specialized Information Service for Philosophy is a joint service with the Thomas Institute (Prof. Andreas Speer).
The Institute for Medieval Philosophy at the University of Cologne comprises several research centers (Averroes Edition, Meister Eckart Archive, Cusanus Research Center) and has made a name for itself in particular through digital platforms and editions.
The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Philosophie e.V. (DGPhil) is the association of philosophers researching and teaching at universities and schools in German-speaking countries. It also includes over 20 philosophical associations with different tasks and focuses in the field of philosophy.
The Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie e.V. is the second largest philosophical association in Germany and supports this project.
The Cologne Competence Center for Research Data Management (C3RDM) is a joint project with the Department of Research Management at the University of Cologne and the Regional Computing Center. The Cologne Competence Center for Research Data Management (C3RDM) bundles the expertise on campus and offers numerous information services in order to provide comprehensive support in research data management to scientists at the University of Cologne.
The USB is involved in several National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) initiatives. We are participating in the development of the National Research Data Infrastructure for personal health data NFDI4Health, a project that has become particularly important in the Corona times, so that a Covid 19 task force has also emerged from this project. We are a consortium partner of nfdi4health under the leadership of the ZB MED - Information Center for Life Sciences.
The aim of NFDI4Health is to merge epidemiological, public health and clinical research: a multidisciplinary team of scientists is to establish a research data infrastructure for personal health data in Germany. ZB MED - Information Center for Life Sciences is an infrastructure and research center for life science information and data. The aim is to support and strengthen research for people and the environment: from medicine and biodiversity to environmental protection.
In addition, the USB is in close contact with the following NFDI consortia: The NFDI consortium for the social, behavioral, educational and economic sciences offers researchers, who are increasingly collaborating in multi- and interdisciplinary projects, support with their research data management (RDM). The institutions participating in KonsortSWD contribute their experience in the operation of user-oriented research data infrastructures to the NFDI.
NFDI4Culture will create an infrastructure for a broad spectrum of research areas - from architecture, art and music to theater, dance, film and media studies. To this end, partners from research, memory institutions, professional associations and infrastructure facilities have come together to establish a decentralized, subject- and research-related infrastructure for research data from the field of tangible and intangible cultural assets.
Text+ aims to establish a research data infrastructure focused on language and text data, initially concentrating on digital collections, lexical resources and editions. These are highly relevant for all language- and text-based disciplines, especially for linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, classical philology, anthropology, non-European cultures and languages as well as language- and text-based research in the social, political and historical sciences.
The DFG is funding the establishment of open access journals for which the USB provides the technical infrastructure:
Kriminologie - Das Online-Journal
Institut für Kriminologie (Dr. Nicole Bögelein & Dr. Mario Bachmann)
MIDU Media in the German Classroom
Institute for German Language and Literature II (Prof. Dr. Michael Staiger & Dr. Andreas Seidler)
The Cologne Data Center for the Humanities (DCH) is a central institution of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Cologne. It supports and advises researchers at the university and beyond on issues relating to the permanent storage, availability and presentation of data and results of research in the humanities. Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne is a teaching and research center of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne.
The Center for Teacher Education (ZfL) is a central academic institution of the university management of the University of Cologne in the area of responsibility of the Vice-Rectorate for Studies and Teaching. It is a common point of contact for student teachers. The Advice Center and the Joint Examination Office, the Graduate School for Teacher Education and coordination offices for future-oriented aspects of teacher education are all located under one roof.
As a documentation center for art, the Art and Museum Library of the City of Cologne (KMB) offers a rich collection of diverse media on art from the Middle Ages to the present day. Its collection focuses on 20th and 21st century art and photography. With over 500,000 volumes, the library is one of the largest public art and museum libraries on modern art and photography in the world.
Federal, state and municipal level
From 2018-2024, the library of Ferdinand Franz Wallraf, the last rector of the old Cologne University, "arch-collector" and arch-citizen of the city, was completely renovated and restored. We were able to preserve this important scholarly library from the so-called Sattelzeit period thanks to the support of our sponsors. They made it possible to save the works from the 15th-19th centuries.
