Bibliographic Data of University Theses from the German National Library (DNB)

Description This dataset provides a comprehensive snapshot of 2,019,655 bibliographic records of university theses, exported in MARC21 XML format from the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek - DNB) as of October 2026. Data Origin At German universities, there is generally a publication requirement for all doctoral theses. Due to its legal deposit mandate, the German National Library maintains a comprehensive collection of doctoral and habilitation theses dating back to 1913.[1] The collection includes university publications from German institutions, as well as German-language doctoral and habilitation theses from abroad. The collection's metadata is provided under the CC0 1.0 free license.[2] Data Acquisition and Methodology The records were retrieved using the DNB's Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU) interface <https://services.dnb.de/sru/dnb>[3]. The General notes on the catalog indicate that the index "hss" is to restrict query results to university publications in combination with "diss*" such as hss=diss* [4]. Due to API constraints (pagination limit of 100000 records per query), the queries were split by the internal DNB identifier (idn). To collect the data, a series of queries, iterating through the identifier prefixes, was executed (hss=diss* AND idn=100*, hss=diss* AND idn=101*, ... hss=diss* AND idn=999*). Data Processing and Packaging The responses were parsed into individual XML files, each named according to its unique DNB identifier. To facilitate easier downloading and storage, the 2,019,655 individual records have been grouped into 20 compressed archives (approximately 100,000 records per archive). Each archive is labeled with the identifiers of the first and last records contained within it. Example The first lines of the first file 1000000001.xml in archive_01_1000000001_to_1027286941.tar.gz: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><record xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim" type="Bibliographic"> <leader>00000nam a2200000 c 4500</leader> <controlfield tag="001">1000000001</controlfield> <controlfield tag="003">DE-101</controlfield> <controlfield tag="005">20240703003834.0</controlfield> <controlfield tag="007">tu</controlfield> <controlfield tag="008">100204s2009 gw ||||| m||| 00||||ger </controlfield> <datafield tag="015" ind1=" " ind2=" "> <subfield code="a">10,H03</subfield> <subfield code="2">dnb</subfield> </datafield>... Ref [1] Dissertations and postdoctoral theses: https://www.dnb.de/EN/Professionell/Services/Dissonline/dissonline_node.html [2] Business model for metadata services: https://www.dnb.de/EN/Professionell/Metadatendienste/Datenbezug/geschaeftsmodell.html [3] "Documentation of the DNB SRU Interface": <https://www.dnb.de/EN/Professionell/Metadatendienste/Datenbezug/SRU/sru_node.html> (web.archive link) [4] "Allgemeine Hinweise zum Katalog, 2.8 Hochschulschriftenvermerk": https://www.dnb.de/DE/Service/Hilfe/Katalog/kataloghilfe_node.html#hss