Concept

In his study Buch, Bibliothek und geisteswissenschaftliche Forschung (Göttingen 1983), Bernhard Fabian propounded his idea of a distributed national library to fill the considerable lacunae in German printed literature collections.

Fabian proposed that five German libraries should each be allotted responsibility for a particular historical period and selected those libraries already holding the most substantial collections for the corresponding period as being best equipped for the task.