About the Library
Founded in 1984, the library of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research is a non-circulating research library that specializes in the social sciences and humanities. It provides information to meet the needs of research staff, other departments in the Institute, and the associated publishing company.
In addition to maintaining and extending holdings, the Library's staff administers electronic resources, procures books and articles through local and interlibrary loans, and conducts bibliographic searches for Institute staff members.
The Library is open to the public and all of its holdings can be used on the premises. Library staff members are available to aid external users searching for literature or information. See Using the Library for further details.
The reference holdings of the HIS Library currently include about 45,000 media in print, among them 260 periodical subscriptions in print. Furthermore thet library's users have access to the Ebook Library (EBC) and 6,000 electronic periodicals.
The Library's holdings can be researched using the Library catalog; our holdings are also listed in the "Katalog.Hamburg", the union catalog for libraries in Hamburg and in the Common Library Network Catalog (GBV). Journals are also listed in the database for periodicals. The holdings profile reflects the focus of research at the Institute, which is conducted primarily within three disciplines - sociology, historiography, and political science.
Description of holdings by topic:
- Social Movements / Protest Movements in the Federal Republic of German
Covering the period from 1945 until the present, this collection includes resources from the Library and the HIS Archives; it encompasses 5,000 monographs and multi-volume works as well as 2,000 periodical titles, including some 60 current periodical subscriptions. Further information can be found on the Archives’ web pages under Special Collection / Protest Movement. - Theory and History of Violence and Peace and Conflict Research
This range of topics documents the history of violence in different political systems around the world during the twentieth century. Keywords are: War and theory, theories of violence, state violence, dictatorship, totalitarianism, political ideologies
World War I and World War II, Vietnam War, Cold War, collective violence, war crimes (with substantial holdings on sexual violence in armed conflicts)
Conflict in the Middle East; international terrorism, combating terrorism; religious ideologies, religious extremism, Islamic State - Politics and Democracy in Europe
Political democracy; processes of democratization; Europeanization; EEC / EC / EU; European constitution - Money and Banks
Financialization; financial capitalism (and inequality); (sociological) monetary theory; digital capitalism; Industry 4.0
Taxes, government tax regimes, tax collection, and political economics, especially in Italy - Theory
Theory in sociology / in historiography / in political science; theory of social/historical processes; action theory; social theory and social philosophy - Other holdings are available on these topics: Politics of remembrance and dealing with the past, collective memory; prosecution of war criminals, truth commissions
Nation / nationalism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and right-wing extremism
Immigration policy / refugee and asylum policy, migration, ethnicity and integration policy
Web and social media
Contact:
Library of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research
Mittelweg 36, 20148 Hamburg
Phone: +49 40 414097-70
Send an email
Staff
Angela Duile, Lara Hoecken, Afra Petersen, Ingwer Schwensen
Student assistants: Marcus Bühler
Director
Gudrun Döllner