When the University was founded as Polytechnische Schule in München in 1868, there was no such thing as computer science, whereas mathematics was part of the general department. One of the first mathematicians, Nicolaus Bischoff (who was a full professor for algebraic analysis, trigonometry and modern geometry), was head of the entire university's library. As early as 1875, when Felix Klein was appointed as Otto Hesse's successor, the mathematical institute was established and along with it the basis for a joint mathematical faculty library. This library's first stock comprised about 600 books with the emphasis on geometry and history of mathematics, amongst them two first editions of Galilei's from the 17th century. They have been preserved in rather good condition and limited access to them is granted.

Up to 1969 the library was basically housed at its original place in the central building of the university, some of it in the meeting room -1229 of today. This room still serves as an archive for the old books. When the faculty moved to what is now called Robert-Sauer-Building southeast of the main building, the library was transferred to room S3437. In 1967 the demands grew with the introduction of the quickly developing field of computer science which used to be part of the faculty of mathematics. At a great sacrifice of the institutes the existing space for the library was more than doubled. In the winter term of 1995/96 thirty working places were newly established. At the moment, the library offers 50 working places on the whole, which is far from being sufficient in view of a staff of about 250 and 2000 students. Presently, the library is still growing by 5500 documents per year. This corresponds to 130 running metres of shelves or a room of 15-18 square metres; in addition, there are external stack rooms.

With the setting-up of an independent Fakultät für Mathematik in 1974 (from 1980 onwards: Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik) and in the course of the new university statutes of the 60s and 70s, the library was restructured - away from the typical reference library exclusively for faculty towards a service library for students and guest scientists as well. When the Fakultät für Mathematik und Informatik was split up into the Fakultät für Mathematik and the Fakultät für Informatik in October 1992, not much was changed as far as the organisational structure was concerned. Both faculties have agreed to keep a joint library.

At the moment, the library stock consists of about 75000 volumes of monographs and conference proceedings, collected works, series, journals (among them 530 actual titles), encyclopedias and dictionaries, theses and 36000 technical reports. The acquisition of technical reports in print has been limited to institutions that do not yet offer their publications via the internet. The reports of the remaining institutions have been made available to users on the library's homepage and are now more easily and quickly accessible then they used to be. Additionally, a server of the NCSTRL (Networked Computer Science Technical Reports Library) project of Cornell has been installed on one of the library's computers, enabling the users to access the publications of 90 institutions, presently. The library's books are arranged according to the above-mentioned categories. The only additional criterion is the alphabet with the exception of conference proceedings, encyclopedias and technical reports. Consequently, the library is not arranged according to subject matter as is typical for the so-called open access arrangement libraries. The library's aquisition activities comprise the whole bandwidth of mathematics and computer science. Since computer science in Munich has its emphasis on engineering and also because the main library of the TUM is considered the Technical Library of the Bavarian State, an especially large amount of books is purchased: the budget for 1996 was 667000 DM with considerable contributions from the faculties.

The appointment of the long-time library consultant Professor Elmar Thoma led also to the establishment of the position of a librarian (focussing on acquisition and catalogueing) in 1971. Taking into account the increasing demands of the faculty as well as the necessity to provide better services in the library "mathematics and computer science", the main library granted a half-post and the faculties two further posts.

The library stock has been protected by an alarm system since 1989; this turned out to be necessary after a huge amount of books were stolen.

The two major bibliographies, the Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete, published by Springer, and the Mathematical Reviews of the AMS are also available on CD-ROM. The Zentralblatt is called CompactMath in this form, the electronic version of the Reviews is called MathSci. Both reviews can be accessed via the library's WWW server. The access to CompactMath is restricted to the faculty of mathematics due to licence agreements. Library users can use the CD-ROM version of CompactMath on a PC. In co-operation with the MeDoc project (information and publication services on a fulltext basis for computer science) the computer science staff can access a great deal of books and magazines.

Since August 1993 all tables of contents of the library's new acquisitions are being scanned and archived with the library system OMNIS/ Myriad, making them searchable. The older stock has been brought into the database of the library by data tapes of the "Generaldirektion der Bayerischen Staatlichen Bibliotheken".

The library's homepage is being updated on a regular basis and new links are continually added. It is worth visiting, indeed! You have worldwide access to electronic journals and reports as well as to the catalogues of our and other libraries, bookshops and publishing companies. Thanks to the firm support of both faculties our electronic system OMNIS/ Myriad has meanwhile developed into an integrated library system with acquisition and cataloguing/archiving functions, searching and lending modules. One of the extended services that the library offers from 1998 onwards is an electronic lending system where you can order books from your working place.

The library is substantially involved in initiating and developing the system ELEKTRA, which will be in use from spring 1998. The goal of this project is the electronic access to journals of different libraries, the retrieval of full texts, and, on request, their printing at the user's working place. After prior agreement of the participating institutions, a maximum number of journals from the field of mathematics and computer science can be accessed and searched. The data files of each participating library are stored locally and can be searched electronically by all other participants. In addition to this searchable information the first page of each article is scanned.

On request, a particular article can be ordered from the lending library (either by the user himself or the borrowing library) according to an electronic article delivery service. At the lending library the whole article is scanned and transferred to the local library server as a graphic file. Pilot libraries of the system are the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, the faculty library of mathematics of the LMU München, the university library of Augsburg and the faculty library mathematics/computer science of the TUM.

The new acquisitions (reports, books, journals) of our library can be found in the newsgroups .

Reiner.Kallenborn @informatik.tu-muenchen.de
Thomas.Ströhlein @informatik.tu-muenchen.de