 The Bavarian State Library in Munich was founded by Herzog Albrecht V in 1558 and is the central archive and state library of the Free State of Bavaria and one of the world's most important international, universal and research libraries. The collection includes some 10 million volumes and approximately 60,000 current subscriptions to scientific journals, many of which are available electronically, plus 1.2 million e-books. With around 94,000 manuscripts, it is one of the largest libraries of handwritten manuscripts in the world. With 20,000 Incunabula, it has the largest collection of Incunabula in the world. As the keeper of a 1,000-year-old cultural heritage, the safes and magazines contain valuable handwritten manuscripts, rare prints and comprehensive special resources such as literary remains, musical supplies, maps and pictures, Asian and Oriental items. And the collection grows by around 150,000 volumes a year. The library has owned the so-called Pflicht Exemplar Recht, right to obligatory copies, since 1663. This agreement ensures that Bavarian publishers supply two copies of each newly published publication free of charge. With over 1.2 million scientific users a year visiting the reading rooms during the 112 opening hours per week, it is one of the most intensively used libraries in Germany. Annually, the staff at the library lend more than 2 million books and provide access to 400,000 documents. The users of the library include students as well as scientists and researchers from all disciplines, furthering their education and also school pupils. The Bavarian State Library is an innovation center for digital information technology and services. The Münchener Digitalisierung Zentrum, Munich Digitization Center, founded in 1997, is today the national competence center for all questions regarding digitization. It is also Germany's leading institution for the mass digitization of written cultural resources. The Bavarian State Library has been using automated scanning facilities since 2006. Within the framework of a revolutionary agreement with Google, the entire collection of public domain works, more than 1 million volumes, are being digitized and made available on the internet. At the moment, the Bavarian State Library makes almost 800,000 digitized books from their collection available free of charge. This is the largest digital data collection of all German libraries. The Bavarian State Library has been experimenting in the field of new and, in particular, mobile uses for digital content for a number of years. The library has driven a number of widely regarded innovations in this area. These include, for example, the famous books, Treasures of the Bavarian State Library app, which offers 50 selected highlights prepared especially for iPhone and iPad, the augmented reality application Ludwig II, software tools enabling image similarity searches in large data collections, as well as highly innovative applications in the field of gesture-based computing. In autumn 2011, the Bavarian State Library also made their Verbund-Katalog, Union-Katalog, with, in excess of 23 million data records, available as linked open data under a CCO license. With a national context, the Bavarian State Library acts as part of a virtual German national library. At the regional level, it takes on the many tasks of a central state and archive library for the free state of Bavaria. For example, acting as the relevant service center for the education and further education of librarians, as the operator of the Bibliotheksverbund Bayern, the regional library network of Bavaria, or by offering consulting and financial support to public libraries in Bavaria. As a meeting point for culture and science, the Bavarian State Library presents a range of exhibitions, lectures, concerts, scientific seminars, symposia and congresses every year. The representative spaces can be rented as an exclusive event location for gala evenings or company celebrations. As the host of the LIBA conference 2013, we look forward to welcoming you in Munich. Welcome to the Bavarian State Library.