ZB MED is the German Documentation Centre of the WHO (World Health Organization) and the depository library for publications of the FAO (Food and Agriculuture Organization of the United Nations).
Digital Collections
ZB MED digitises content from the fields of medicine, health, and nutritional, environmental and agricultural science. The library also has a number of special collections devoted to specific topics:
- Library of the Lower Rhine Association of Public Health
- Physical Anthropology
- Apiology (scientific study of bees) collection
Closed collections
- American patient reference materials – holdings of the former "Special Services Library Bismarck Kaserne", Schwäbisch-Gmünd (works published up to 1990, location: 1998 A 10325 – 1998 A 10604)
- We hold the most extensive, systematically arranged archive collections covering every aspect of agricultural science in Europe
- Virtually all German theses on agricultural science
- Theses from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (since 1910)
- Theses from the ‘Landbouwhogeschool Wageningen’ (since 1918)
- Cologne Grammar School Library (primarily items from the 18th and 19th centuries on medical practice)
- Collection of German "Hausväterliteratur" (a genre of literature providing advice on household and estate management and their social structures, primarily from the 17th and 18th centuries)
- Library of the Cologne General Medical Association
- Historical stocks of the former Rhineland Chamber of Agriculture (items published up to 1945)
- Library of the Lower Rhine Association of Public Health
- DFG-funded collection of East German literature (1963–1989)
- Prussian statistics (1805–1934) and statistics of the German Reich (1873–1883)
- Special geological maps and reports issued by the Prussian Geological Institute (1873–1939)
- Extensive archives collected in its role as a depository library for the publications of the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) and for serial publications of the Agricultural Experiment Stations of the U.S. federal states (up to 2004)
- The complete publications of the German social policy association ‘Verein für Sozialpolitik’ (1873–1936)
Bequests
- Book collection of the Cologne surgeon Bernhard Bardenheuer (1839–1913)
- Bequest of Professor Theodor Brinkmann (German agricultural scientist, 1877–1951, biography in German)
- Bequest of the Coblenz Privy Councillor Albrecht Erlenmeyer (German psychiatrist and graphologist, 1849–1926)
- Bequest of Professor Theodor Freiherr von der Goltz (German agricultural scientist, 1836–1905, biography in German)
- Robert Hauf (older theses, 1931–1933)
- Library bequest of Professor Erich Hoffmann, (one of the two scientists who discovered the syphilis bacterium, 1868–1959)
- Friedrich Moritz (German specialist in internal medicine, 1869–1931, information in German)
- Library of August Pollmann (German bee expert and lecturer in agriculture, 1812–1898, information in German)
- Karl Hubert Sattler (Austrian ophthalmologist, 1844–1928)
- Reference collection of the physiologist Hugo Seemann (1913)
- Collection of monographs by the anatomist Wilhelm Waldeyer (1836–1921)
- Medical sections of the Ferdinand Franz Wallraf Library (1748–1824, information in German)
- Wirz (medical practice, 1929)
- Professor Ferdinand Zinsser (works on dermatology and venereology, 1931)
